The New York Trilogy

The New York Trilogy

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

First published in 1985???1986, "The New York Trilogy "("City of Glass, Ghosts," and "The Locked Room") brought immediate international attention to its author, Paul Auster, and elevated him to near-celebrity status, particularly in France. This trilogy and his many works since then (including "In the Country of Last Words," "Leviathan," "Mr. Vertigo," "Moon Palace," and others) have been translated into numerous languages and have brought him further world attention. Auster's trilogy broke ground in its mix of serious fictional techniques and detective and mystery genres. Geoffrey O'Brien of "The Village Voice "wrote: ""The New York Trilogy "are novels of desire: the desire to write a detective novel, to read one, to -inhabit it. . . . By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have -initiated a whole new round of storytelling." This new edition will delight readers and collectors of Auster's work.
Read online
  • 3 632
Mr. Vertigo

Mr. Vertigo

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Paul Auster's dazzling, picaresque novel is the story of one Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as "Walt the Wonder Boy." It is the late 1920's, the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone, and Walt is a Saint Louis orphan rescued frm the streets by the mysterious Hungarian Master Yehudi, who teaches Walt to walk on air. The vaudeville act that results from Walt's marvelous new abiltiy takes them across a vast and vibrant country, where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob. Walt's rise to fame and fortune mirrors America's own coming of age, and his resilience, like that of the nation, is challenged over and over again. Mr. Vertigo is a bravura celebration of a raucous age, an ambitious and enduringly brilliant tale of trial and triumph.
Read online
  • 1 136
Leviathan

Leviathan

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

So begins the story told by Peter Aaron and his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a world he shared. and then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or night not have been intentional, Sachs disappeared. Now Aaron must piece together the life that led to Sach's death. His sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it, before those who are investigating the case invent an account of their own. Paul Auster's extraordinary seventh novel is about friendship and betrayal, sexual desire and estrangement, and the unpredictable instrusions of violence in the everyday. It is a daring and immensely moving story by an author whom The Times Literary Supplement has called "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers."
Read online
  • 1 062
Sunset Park

Sunset Park

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force, Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse. An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families. A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives. A celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway. An independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts. Sunset Park is a surprising departure that confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers.
Read online
  • 1 054
Moon Palace

Moon Palace

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Spanning three generations, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit, "Moon Palace" follows an orphan child of the sixties as he seeks the key to his past and the answers to the riddle of his fate.
Read online
  • 884
Invisible

Invisible

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

“One of America’s greatest novelists” dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story in his most passionate and surprising book to date Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.” 
Read online
  • 854
The Music of Chance

The Music of Chance

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

In a Pennsylvania meadow, a young fireman and an angry gambler are forced to build a wall of fifteenth-century stone. For Jim Nashe, it all started when he came into a small inheritance and left Boston in pusuit of "a life of freedom." Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe met Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe's last funds, they entered a poker game against two rich eccentrics, "risking everything on the single turn of a card." In Paul Auster's world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is redemption, nonetheless, in Nashe's resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love.
Read online
  • 843

The Red Notebook: True Stories

The Red Notebook: True Stories

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Paul Auster has earned international praise for the imaginative power of his many novels, including The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo, and Timbuktu. He has also published a number of highly original non-fiction works: The Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth, and The Art of Hunger. In The Red Notebook, Auster again explores events from the real world large and small, tragic and comic—that reveal the unpredictable, shifting nature of human experience. A burnt onion pie, a wrong number, a young boy struck by lightning, a man falling off a roof, a scrap of paper discovered in a Paris hotel room—all these form the context for a singular kind of ars poetica, a literary manifesto without theory, cast in the irreducible forms of pure story telling.
Read online
  • 751
Man in het duister

Man in het duister

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident at his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget-his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the Union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Passionate and shocking, Man in the dark is a novel of our moment-one that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the ordinary joys of everyday life.
Read online
  • 669
Day/Night: Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark

Day/Night: Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ONE VOLUME, TWO EXISTENTIAL CLASSICS BY BESTSELLING NOVELIST PAUL AUSTER Day/Night brings together two metaphysical novels that mirror each other and are meant to be read in tandem: two men, each confined to a room, one suddenly alert to his existence, the other desperate to escape into sleep. In Travels in the Scriptorium (2007), elderly Mr. Blank wakes in an unfamiliar cell, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He must use the few objects he finds and the information imparted by the day’s string of visitors to cobble together an idea of his identity. In Man in the Dark (2008), another old man, August Brill, suffering from insomnia, struggles to push away thoughts of painful personal losses by imagining what might have been. Who are we? What is real and not real? How does the political intersect with the personal? After great loss, why are some of us unable to go on? “One of America’s greats” and “a descendant of Kafka and Borges,”* Auster explores in these two small masterpieces some of our most pressing philosophical concerns. Time Out (Chicago) *Booklist
Read online
  • 634
Report From the Interior

Report From the Interior

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to date In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . . Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior. From his baby's-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Report from the Interior charts Auster's moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s. Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life—and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: The final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures. At once a story of the times—which makes it everyone's story—and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before. A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013
Read online
  • 559
Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

The high-spirited correspondence between New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, death, family, marriage, friendship, and love. Their correspondence offers an intimate and often amusing portrait of these two men as they explore the complexities of the here and now and is a reflection of two sharp intellects whose pleasure in each other’s friendship is apparent on every page.
Read online
  • 557
The Invention of Solitude

The Invention of Solitude

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

In this debut work by New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy), The Invention of Solitude, a memoir, established Auster’s reputation as a major new voice in American writing. His moving and personal meditation on fatherhood is split into two stylistically separate sections. In the first, Auster reflects on the memories of his father who was a distant, undemonstrative, and cold man who died an untimely death. As he sifts through his Father’s things, Auster uncovers a sixty-year-old murder mystery that sheds light on his father’s elusive character. In the second section, the perspective shifts and Auster begins to reflect on his own identity as a father by adopting the voice of a narrator, “A.” Through a mosaic of images, coincidences, and associations “A,” contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather, turning the story into a self-conscious reflection on the process of writing.
Read online
  • 546
Winter Journal

Winter Journal

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

On January 3, 2011, exactly one month before his sixty-fourth birthday, Paul Auster sat down and wrote the first entry of Winter Journal, his unorthodox, beautifully wrought examination of his own life, as seen through the history of his body. Composed in the manner of a musical fugue, the journal advances from one autobiographical fragment to the next, jumping backward and forward in time as the various themes intersect, bounce off one another, and ultimately merge in a great chorus of multiple voices, of one voice multiplied into many. Writing in the second person, as if addressing himself as a stranger, which at the same time establishes an uncanny intimacy with the reader, Auster takes us from childhood to the brink of old age as he summons forth a universe of physical sensation, of pleasures and pains, moving from the awakening sexual desire as an adolescent to the ever deepening bonds of married love, from the shocks of violent accidents to an account of his mother's sudden death in 2002, from meditations on eating and sleeping to the "scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity" in 1978 that set him on a new course as a writer. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, his first book of prose, Paul Auster has now given us a second memoir of uncommon power and grace. Winter Journal is a book that looks straight into the heart of what it means to be alive.
Read online
  • 477
4 3 2 1

4 3 2 1

Paul Auster

Fiction / Memoir

Astonishing, a masterpiece, Paul Auster’s greatest, most satisfying, most vivid and heartbreaking novel -- a sweeping and surprising story of inheritance, family, love and life itself. Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson’s life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. Meanwhile, readers will take in each Ferguson’s pleasures and ache from each Ferguson’s pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson’s life rushes on. As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that readers have never seen from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
Read online
  • 330
183