Most Popular Books by Paul Auster

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.

Retired life insurance salesman Nathan Glass moves to Brooklyn to find anonymity and solitude through his declining years, but a chance meeting with Tom Wood, his long-lost nephew, forces him to come to terms with his past.

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.

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.

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.

Oracle Night is a compulsively readable novel by ''one of the great writers of our time.'' (San Francisco Chronicle). Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in 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 bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. If The New York Trilogy was Paul Auster''s detective story, his mesmerizing eleventh 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. Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster''s reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today. ''His old-fashioned art of creating suspense . . . which rivals M. R. James or Conan Doyle. In fact, Oracle Night is best read as a post-modern ghost story.'' The Guardian

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year "Man in the Dark is an undoubted pleasure to read. Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter."--Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books From a "literary original" (The Wall Street Journal) comes a book 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. 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 desperately trying to avoid insists on being told.

A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art Spiegelman Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a “post-existentialist private eye.” An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print. Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster’s groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.

The screenplay also received an Independent Spirit Award in 1996." "Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Smoke directly inspired Blue in the Face, a largely improvised comedy shot in a total of six days. A film unlike any other, it stars Harvey Keitel, with featured performances by Roseanne, Lily Tomlin, Lou Reed, and Michael J. Fox."

“[A] civilized discourse between two cultivated and sophisticated men. . . . It’s a pleasure to be in their company.”—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post “An extended meditation on the processes of friendship, [Here and Now] has something substantive to offer.”—The New York Times Book Review After a meeting at an Australian literary festival brought them together in 2008, novelists Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee began exchanging letters on a regular basis with the hope they might “strike sparks off each other." Here and Now is the result: a three-year epistolary dialogue that touches on nearly every subject from sports to fatherhood, literature to film, philosophy to politics, from the financial crisis to art, death, marriage, friendship, and love. Their high-spirited and luminous correspondence offers an intimate and often amusing portrait of these two men as they explore the complexities of the here and now and reveal their delight in each other’s friendship on every page.

Each day an old man awakes with no memory, unsure of whether or not he is locked into the room. A middle-aged woman called Annaenters & talks of pills & treatment, but also of love & promises. Who is this Mr Blank, & what is his fate?