Best Selling Books by Paul Auster

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels – from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster''s work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems. This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition includes an introduction from author and professor Luc Sante, as well as a pulp novel-inspired cover from Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic artist of Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

* * * Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize * * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Globe and Mail, Kirkus Reviews, Huffington Post, and The Spectator UK “An epic bildungsroman . . . . Original and complex . . . . A monumental assemblage of competing and complementary fictions, a novel that contains multitudes.”—Tom Perrotta, The New York Times Book Review “A stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. . . . An incredibly moving, true journey.”—NPR New York Times Bestseller, Los Angeles Times Bestseller, Boston Globe Bestseller, National Indiebound Bestseller Paul Auster’s greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel—a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of 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.

From the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel – a spare, powerful, intensely visionary novel about the bare-bones conditions of survival In a distant and unsettling future, Anna Blume is on a mission in an unnamed city of chaos and disaster. Its destitute inhabitants scavenge garbage for food and shelter, no industry exists, and an elusive government provides nothing but corruption. Anna wades through the filth to find her long-lost brother, a one-time journalist who may or may not be alive. New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) shows us a disturbing Hobbesian society in this dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel.

A “beautiful and haunting” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel of an orphan’s search for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his fate, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster “Auster is a master storyteller . . . Moon Palace shimmers with mysteries.”—The Washington Post Book World Marco Stanley Fogg is an orphan, a child of the sixties, a quester tirelessly seeking the key to his past, the answers to the ultimate riddle of his fate. As Marco journeys from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah, he encounters a gallery of characters and a series of events as rich and surprising as any in modern fiction. Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and from there moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is an entertaining and moving novel from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.

From the bestselling author of Oracle Night and The Book of Illusions, an exhilarating, whirlwind tale of one man''s accidental redemption Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore—a far cry from the brilliant academic career he''d begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom''s boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York." Through Tom and Harry, Nathan''s world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances—not to mention a stray relative or two—and leads him to a reckoning with his past. Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man." But life takes over instead, and Nathan''s despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others. The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster''s warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.

From Paul Auster, author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A novel – his debut work of fiction, the first volume in his acclaimed “New York Trilogy” series of novels Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Mystery of the Year, City of Glass inaugurates the intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that the Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye...It''s as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective fiction and crime books, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense to City of Glass.

Interviews with the author of The New York Trilogy, In the Country of Last Things, and The Brooklyn Follies

''One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.'' So begins Paul Auster''s moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. The first section, ''Portrait of an Invisible Man'', reveals Auster''s memories and feelings after the death of his father. In ''The Book of Memory'' the perspective shifts to Auster''s role as a father. The narrator, ''A'', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling.

With uncompromising insight, Auster reinvents the coming-of-age story and takes readers into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power.

Originally published: New York: Henry Holt, 2003.

Chosen by Paul Auster out of the four thousand stories submitted to his radio programme on National Public Radio, these 180 stories provide a wonderful portrait of America in the twentieth century. The requirement for selection was that each of the stories should be true, and each of the writers should not have been previously published. The collection that has emerged provides a richly varied and authentic voice for the American people, whose lives, loves, griefs, regrets, joys and sense of humour are vividly and honestly recounted throughout, and adeptly organised by Auster into themed sections. The section composed of war stories stretches as far back as the Civil War, still the defining moment in American history; while the sequence of ''Meditations'' conclude the volume with a true and abiding sense of transcendence. The resultant anthology is both an enduring hymn to the strange everyday of contemporary American life and a masterclass in the art of storytelling.

Contains: The red notebook -- Why write? -- Accident report -- It don''t mean a thing.

Facing his sixty-forth winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster decides to write a journal as he sees himself aging in ways he never imagined. Compellingly written, and with dreamlike logic and urgency, the autobiographical fragments and meditations produce an extraordinary mosaic of a life. Weaving together vividly detailed stories, Auster illuminates how each small incident comes to signify a whole. Also, there are two recurring moments: one of bodily terror -- his panic attack following his mother''s death in 2002; the other of joy -- his experience watching a dance piece in 1978 which releases him from writer''s block just prior to his father''s death. It was his father''s death that began his first equally unconventional and internationally celebrated memoir, The Invention of Solitude, published thirty years ago. Now, Auster has included an unforgettable portrait of his mother. Winter Journal is a surprising and moving meditation on time, the body, the weight of memory, a long and fulfilling marriage (with author Siri Hustvedt), and language itself by one of the most interesting and elegant writers writing today, and one with a devoted following.

An “exceptional” (Los Angeles Times) novel of fate, loyalty, responsibility, and the real meaning of freedom with “all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller” (The New York Times), from renowned author Paul Auster “A rich, dazzling performance . . . a tour de force about freedom and imprisonment, motion and stasis, order and randomness . . . its story beautifully paced and shaped, its tone powerfully ominous.”—The Wall Street Journal FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD 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 pursuit of “a life of freedom.” Careening back and forth across the United States, waiting for the money to run out, Nashe meets Jack Pozzi, a young man with a temper and a plan. With Nashe’s last funds, they enter a poker game against two rich eccentrics. But when their plans backfire, Jim and Jack are indentured by their elusive marks, who order them to erect a meaningless wall with bricks gathered from ruins of an Irish castle. Time passes, their debts mount, and anger builds as the two struggle to dig themselves out of their Kafkaesque serfdom. In Paul Auster’s world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims, where chance is a shifting and powerful force, there is nonetheless redemption in Nashe’s resolute quest for justice and his capacity for love.

Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior. In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . . 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.

In this rich and emotionally charged work, a man''s obsession with a silent film star sends him on a journey into a shadowy world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love.

From the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1 and The New York Trilogy comes Paul Auster''s luminous, tour de force novel set during the 2008 economic collapse. "Auster fans and newcomers will find in Sunset Park his usual beautifully nuanced prose.... [and] a tremendous crash bang of an ending.” — NPR Sunset Park opens with twenty-eight-year-old Miles Heller trashing out foreclosed houses in Florida, the latest stop in his flight across the country. When Miles falls in love with Pilar Sanchez, he finds himself fleeing once again, going back to New York, where his family still lives, and into an abandoned house of young squatters in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Woven together from various points of view—that of Miles''s father, an independent book publisher trying to stay afloat, Miles''s mother, a celebrated actress preparing her return to the New York stage, and the various men and women who live in the house—"Auster seems to carry all of humanity inside him" (The Boston Globe).

'' I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'' Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in 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 rather forget - his wife''s recent death and the horrific murder, in Iraq, of his granddaughter''s boyfriend, Titus. Brill, a 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 on 9/11, 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. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts another hidden story, this time of his own marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus''s death. Passionate and shocking, political and personal: Man in the Dark is a novel that reflects the consequences of 9/11, that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

A LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted and New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster''s comprehensive, landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane. With Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster tells the extraordinary story of Stephen Crane, best known as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, who transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Auster’s probing account of this singular life tracks Crane as he rebounds from one perilous situation to the next: A controversial article written at twenty disrupts the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, a public battle with the New York police department over the false arrest of a prostitute effectively exiles him from the city, a star-crossed love affair with an unhappily married uptown girl tortures him, a common-law marriage to the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse endures, a shipwreck results in his near drowning, he withstands enemy fire to send dispatches from the Spanish-American War, and then he relocates to England, where Joseph Conrad becomes his closest friend and Henry James weeps over his tragic, early death. In Burning Boy, Auster not only puts forth an immersive read about an unforgettable life but also, casting a dazzled eye on Crane’s astonishing originality and productivity, provides uniquely knowing insight into Crane’s creative processes to produce the rarest of reading experiences—the dramatic biography of a brilliant writer as only another literary master could tell it.

Meet Mr Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster''s remarkable novel. Bones is the sidekick of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant but troubled poet-saint from Brooklyn. Together they sally forth across America to Baltimore, Maryland, on one last great adventure, searching for Willy''s old teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who used to know him as William Gurevitch, son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs Swanson still alive? And if not, what will prevent Willy from vanishing into that other world known as Timbuktu? ''In this brilliant novel, Auster writes with economy, precision and the quirky pathos of noir, addressing the pernicious ubiquity of American consumerism, the nature of love and the core riddles of ontology. Above all, though, this is the affecting tale of a special dog''s place in the universe of humans and in the fleeting life of a special man.'' Publishers Weekly

''I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water . . .'' So begins Mr Vertigo, the story of Walt, an irrepressible orphan from the Mid-West. Under the tutelage of the mesmerising Master Yehudi, Walt is taken back to the mysterious house on the plains to prepare not only for the ability to fly, but also for the stardom that will accompany it. At the same time a delighted race through 1920s Americana and a richly allusive parable, Mr Vertigo is a compelling, magical novel - a work of true originality by a writer at the height of his powers. ''A virtuoso piece of storytelling by a master of the modern American fable.'' The Independent

A “compelling” (Los Angeles Times) tale of friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday – from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel "Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin. . . ." So begins the story by Peter Aaron about 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 might 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.

The second book in the acclaimed New York Trilogy--a detective story that becomes a haunting and eerie exploration of identity and deception. It is a story of hidden violence that culminates in an inevitable but unexpectedly shattering climax.

The expanded edition of an essential collection of writings, essays, and interviews from Paul Auster, one of the finest thinkers and stylists in contemporary letters. The celebrated author of The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions, and 4 3 2 1 presents here a highly personal collection of essays, prefaces, true stories, autobiographical writings, and collaborations with artists, as well as occasional pieces written for magazines and newspapers, including his "breathtaking memoir" (Financial Times), The Invention of Solitude. Ranging in subject from Sir Walter Raleigh to Kafka, Nathaniel Hawthorne to the high-wire artist Philippe Petit, conceptual artist Sophie Calle to Auster''s own typewriter, the World Trade Center catastrophe to his beloved New York City itself, Collected Prose records the passions and insights of a writer who "will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle).

A timeless, utterly charming Christmas fable, beautifully illustrated and destined to become a classic When Paul Auster was asked by The New York Times to write a Christmas story for the Op-Ed page, the result, "Auggie Wren''s Christmas Story," led to Auster''s collaboration on a film adaptation, Smoke. Now the story has found yet another life in this enchanting illustrated edition with Argentine artist Isol. It begins with a writer''s dilemma: he''s been asked by The New York Times to write a story that will appear in the paper on Christmas morning. The writer agrees, but he has a problem: How to write an unsentimental Christmas story? He unburdens himself to his friend at his local cigar shop, a colorful character named Auggie Wren. "A Christmas story? Is that all?" Auggie counters. "If you buy me lunch, my friend, I''ll tell you the best Christmas story you ever heard. And I guarantee every word of it is true." And an unconventional story it is, involving a lost wallet, a blind woman, and a Christmas dinner. Everything gets turned upside down. What''s stealing? What''s giving? What''s a lie? What''s the truth? It''s vintage Auster, and pure pleasure: a truly unsentimental but completely affecting tale.

An intimate and astonishing rumination on gun violence in America from one of our greatest living writers and “genuine American original” (The Boston Globe) Paul Auster Paul Auster was a crack marksman as a kid, and like most American boys of his generation he grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B-Westerns. But he also knows how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence: His grandmother shot and killed his grandfather when his father was just six years old. Now, at this time of intense national discord, no issue divides Americans more deeply than the debate about guns. There are currently more guns than people in the United States, and every day more than one hundred Americans are killed by guns and another two hundred are wounded. These numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different—and why are we the most violent country in the Western world? In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, through the colonial prehistory of the Republic, armed conflict against the native population, the forced enslavement of millions, and the mass shootings that dominate the current news cycle. He examines the embattled gun-control and anti-gun-control camps, frames gun violence as a public health issue, and investigates the details of one horrific incident– including the perpetrator’s unchecked purchase of the gun he used and the suffering of a bystander-turned-hero. Filled with haunting photographs by Spencer Ostrander that document the abandoned sites of more than thirty mass shootings, Bloodbath Nation is an unflinching work about guns in America that asks: What kind of society do we want to live in?

By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster''s memoir is essentially an autobiography about money--and what it means not to have any. From the streets of New York and Paris to the rural roads of upstate New York, the author treats readers to a series of remarkable adventures and unforgettable encounters, as he attempts to survive on nothing. 3-color insert.

A taut yet expansive novel of love, memory, and grief from Paul Auster, best-selling, award-winning author and "one of the great American prose stylists of our time" (New York Times) Paul Auster''s brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner -- phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor - has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner''s life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next forty years, and back to Baumgartner''s youth in Newark and his Polish-born father''s life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary. Rich with compassion, wit, and Auster''s keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient moments of ordinary life, Baumgartner asks: Why do we remember certain moments, and forget others? In one of his most luminous works and his first novel since the Booker-shortlisted tour-de-force 4 3 2 1, Paul Auster captures several lifetimes.

Publisher description

An inside look into Paul Auster''s art and craft, the inspirations and obsessions, mesmerizing and dramatic in turn. A remarkably candid, and often surprisingly dramatic, investigation into one writer''s art, craft, and life, A Life in Words is rooted in three years of dialogue between Auster and Professor I. B. Siegumfeldt, starting in 2011, while Siegumfeldt was in the process of launching the Center for Paul Auster Studies at the University of Copenhagen. It includes a number of surprising disclosures, both concerning Auster''s work and about the art of writing generally. It is a book that''s full of surprises, unscripted yet amounting to a sharply focused portrait of the inner workings of one of America''s most productive and successful writers, through all twenty-one of Auster''s narrative works and the themes and obsessions that drive them.

From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his deeply beloved series, The New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction. In 1985, Paul Auster''s City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster''s acclaimed New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics. Now the wait is over. The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpration of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass, an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist’s downfall. And in The Locked Room, another author is experiencing writer’s block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel. Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster’s sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading.

The story of a manual Olympia typewriter, more than 25 years old, and the agent of transmission for the work of one of the most varied and critically acclaimed contemporary authors. Also the story of a relationship, between Auster, his typewriter, and the artist Sam Messer, who, as Auster writes, ''has turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world.'' Written in Auster''s discerning prose and illustrated with Messer''s obsessive drawings and paintings, this book will stun fans and fine-book lovers alike. 30 pages in full-colour.