New Releases by Paul Auster

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?

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.

An Updated Collection of Nonfiction, including the seminal work The Invention of Solitude, from Man Booker Prize Finalist Paul AusterPaul Auster has spent his fifty-year writing career examining what it means to be truly alive. And now, for the first time ever, in this newly self-curated collection, Auster stitches together various autobiographical writings to lay bare the trajectory of both his personal life and sense of self.From his breakout memoir, The Invention of Solitude, which solidified Auster''s reputation as a canonical voice in American letters, to excerpts from his later memoirs, Winter Journal and Report from the Interior, readers are ushered into the inner workings of Auster''s self-development. His sweeping recollection winds through the halls of Columbia University during the turbulent 1960s and into life as a young poet-turned-novelist, then dives headfirst into the realities that accompany aging today. Along the way, Auster continually challenges the notion of what autobiography can be, inverting the form through fragmentation and, ultimately, illustrating firsthand the brilliance behind "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle).

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.

* * * 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.

Efter et langt sygdomsforløb lider forfatteren Sidney Orr af skriveblokering. En ny notesbog sætter ham i gang med en historie, der tilsyneladende får skæbnesvanger indflydelse på hans liv. Forfatteren Sidney Orr er langsomt ved at komme sig efter en alvorlig sygdom. Under en af sine daglige spadsereture i kvarteret, hvor han bor, går han helt tilfældigt ind i en papirvareforretning, hvor han bliver fristet til at købe en blå notesbog. Denne i sig selv banale hændelse bliver starten på en række begivenheder, som ændrer tilværelsen afgørende for Sidney Orr og de mennesker, der står ham nærmest. Paul Austers Orakelnat er en fortælling om historien i historien, en slags "kinesisk æske-roman". "Paul Auster har aldrig været bedre end i ''Orakel nat'' ... Det er Auster på de høje nagler, og ''Orakel nat'' skal - jeg mener: SKAL – læses af alle, der både vil tænke og bevæges." - Bo Kampmann Walther i Kristeligt Dagblad "Der er ikke én god fortælling, men hundredevis af små gode historier, anekdoter og dokumenter (f.eks. en side fra en polsk telefonbog fra 1937), der spejler og infilterer bogens overordnede kammerspil ... Man får fornemmelsen af at være vidne til et frydefuldt litterært trylleri. Men det er ikke bar underholdning. Under overfladen er det brændende alvor for Auster." - Karsten R. S. Ifversen i Politiken

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.

For the first time in one volume, two existential classics by internationally 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, 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, 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" (Time Out – Chicago) and "a descendant of Kafka and Borges," (Booklist) Auster explores in these two small masterpieces some of our most pressing philosophical concerns.

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

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.

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.

''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

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).

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.

Publisher description

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.

This title brings together three of Paul Auster''s early novels. The novels featured are ''The New york Trilogy'', ''Moon Palace'', and ''In the Country of Last Things''.

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.

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.

The insider''s guide and perfect companion to the new film starring Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Vanessa Redgrave--the romantic story of two lonely, mismatched strangers, transformed into soul mates by the uncanny power of a phosphorescent stone. 40 photos.

Acclaimed author Paul Aster shows the reader how his short story metamorphosed into a feature film starring William Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Forest Whitaker and Stockard Channing. The book includes the short story, photos, conversations with the actors and Auster, and follows the process of a germ of an idea being brought to fruition.

In this astonishingly acrobatic work, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature--or art--through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Laura Riding, Knut Hamsun, John Ashbery, and other vital figures of our century. In a section of interviews as well as in the revelatory ?The Red Notebook,? Auster reflects on his own work: on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing; on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Art of Hunger undermines and expands our accepted notions about literature and throws an uprecedented light on his own richly allusive writing.

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.