Most Popular Books by Paul Auster

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.

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster “Exhilarating . . . a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer-detective who’s never satisfied with just the facts.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer City of Glass: As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Ghosts: Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his own window. The Locked Room: Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened to him and why is the narrator, Fanshawe’s boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life? Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this is a uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as “post-existential private eye. . . . It’s as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version.”

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.

The celebrated author of "The New York Trilogy, The Book of Illusions" and "Oracle Night" now offers an essential collection of essays, prefaces, true stories, autobiographical writings, and collaborations with artists.

In his debut memoir, renowned author Paul Auster shares heartfelt and personal meditations on fatherhood that “integrates heart and intellect, sensation and speculation . . . as it relentlessly tries to make sense of the shocks of living” (Newsday) “Moving, delicately perceived portraits of lives and relationships.”—The New York Times Book Review “One day there is life. . . . And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.” The Invention of Solitude, split into two stylistically separate sections, established Paul Auster’s reputation as a major voice in American literature. The first section, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” explores Auster’s memories and feelings after the death of his father, a distant, undemonstrative, almost cold man. As he attends to his father’s business affairs and sifts through his effects, Auster uncovers a sixty-year-old family murder mystery that sheds light on his father’s elusive character. In “The Book of Memory,” the perspective shifts from Auster’s identity as a son to his role as a father. Through a mosaic of images, coincidences, and associations, the narrator, “A,” contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather, and the solitary nature of storytelling and writing.

From the bestselling novelist and author of The Invention of Solitude, 4 3 2 1, and The New York Trilogy, Winter Journal presents a moving and highly personal meditation on the body, time, and language itself. "That is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well." Facing his sixty-third winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations—both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother''s life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.

The discovery of a mysterious notebook turns a man''s life upside down in this compulsively page-turning tale by "one of the great writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M. R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously close his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster''s mesmerizing novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book—only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man''s imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster''s reputation as one of the boldest, most original American writers.

A LOS ANGELES TIMES Book Prize Winner 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.

Now including The Red Notebook--a collection of autobiographical sketches on coincidence--The Art Of Hunger undermines our accepted notions about literature. Auster''s meditations on writing and artists leads us to a better understanding of the toll of writing.

Auster''s novel of love and forgiveness from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: ''a literary voice for the ages'' ( Guardian) S unset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation he has been avoiding for years. Set against the backdrop of the devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of Auster''s previous novel Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.

Paul Auster''s magical, surrealist tale from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: ''a literary voice for the ages'' ( Guardian) ''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 ''virtuoso piece of storytelling by a master of the modern American fable.'' ( Independent)

Together Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant but troubled poet-saint from Brooklyn, and his faithful dog sally forth in search of Willy''s beloved high-school teacher who, years ago, knew him as William Gurevitch, son of Polish war refugees.

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.

In this acrobatic and virtuosic collection, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature. In a selection of interviews, as well as in the essay ''The Red Notebook'' itself, Auster reflects upon his own work, on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing, and on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Red Notebook both illuminates and undermines our accepted notions about literature, and guides us towards a finer understanding of the dangerously high stakes involved in writing. It also includes Paul Auster''s impassioned essay ''A Prayer for Salman Rushdie'', as well as a set of striking and bittersweet reminiscences collected under the apposite title, ''Why Write?''

A man pieces together clues to his past—and the identity of his captors—in this fantastic, labyrinthine novel from beloved author Paul Auster. An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues. Determining that he is locked in, the man—identified only as Mr. Blank—begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn''t recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. As the day passes, various characters call on the man in his cell—vaguely familiar people, some who seem to resent him for crimes he can''t remember—and each brings frustrating hints of his identity and his past. All the while an overhead camera clicks and clicks, recording his movements, and a microphone records every sound in the room. Someone is watching. Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor. And yet, as we discover during one day in the life of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own.

From the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of Oracle Night and 4 3 2 1, 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.

In this novel Paul Auster offers a haunting picture of a devastated world - a futuristic world - but one which may be seen to shadow our own. Auster has also written The New York Trilogy.