Most Popular Books by Paul Auster

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 New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster, a dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel “reminiscent in many ways of Orwell’s 1984” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). “Powerful, original, imaginative, and handled with artistry . . . One of the better modern attempts at describing hell.”—The Washington Post Book World In a distant and unsettling future, the masses are homeless, theft is so rampant it is no longer a crime, and death—by arranging either a suicide or an assassination—is the only way out. It is in these circumstances that Anna Blume begins her search for her brother, a one-time journalist who may or may not still be alive, in an unnamed city whose destitute inhabitants dig through garbage and elusive government provides nothing but corruption. In her struggle to survive, Anna becomes a scavenger of objects from the past to sell for food and shelter. But she will also find friendship—and even love—in this devastated world. In the Country of Last Things is a tour de force that reaffirms Paul Auster’s stature as one of the most accomplished and singular talents of his generation.

EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE • In this stunning debut novel, the first volume in Paul Auster’s acclaimed The New York Trilogy, an author determined to solve a mystery begins to descend into madness. “Remarkable . . . The book is a pleasure to read, full of suspense and action. . . . [A] strange and powerful adventure.”—The New York Times Book Review After a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, an author of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Composed with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense. City of Glass inaugurates the intriguing New York Trilogy of 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.” The brilliant installments of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy include: CITY OF GLASS • GHOSTS • THE LOCKED ROOM

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “compelling” (Los Angeles Times) novel of friendship, betrayal, estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday—from “a literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own” (The Wall Street Journal) “Rich and complex . . . with fully fleshed characters, a fast-paced plot, thematic sophistication, and narrative cunning.”—The Boston Globe “Six days ago, a man blew himself up by the side of a road in northern Wisconsin.” So begins Peter Aaron’s story 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. Leviathan 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.”

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.

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 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.

''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.

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).

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 ... novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world ... 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, [this book] charts Auster''s moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s"--

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

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.

"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." So begins Paul Auster''s brilliant, devastating tale about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. 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 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. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus''s death. Passionate and shocking, Man in the Dark is a story of our moment, an audiobook 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.

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.

"Who was Hector Mann?

From the bestselling author of "Oracle Night" and "The Book of Illusions," comes an exhilarating, whirlwind tale of one man''s accidental redemption.

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 1994, 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 interpretation 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.

"A sweeping family saga (with a bit of a twist) about the life and loves of Archie Ferguson, a Jewish boy born to second-generation immigrants in the United States just after World War II"--

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.

Recovering from a near-fatal illness, Sidney Orr, a thirty-four-year-old novelist, purchases a mysterious blue notebook from a Brooklyn stationery shop and is drawn into a bizarre world of eerie premonitions and baffling events.

"The Locked Room is the story of a writer who lacks the creativity to produce fiction. Fanshawe, his childhood friend, has produced creative work, and when he disappears the writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. When Fanshawe disappears, leaving behind a wife, a baby and an extraordinary cache of novels, plays and poems, his boyhood friend is lured obsessively into the life that Fanshawe left behind."--Goodreads

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.

Publisher description

“Nobody—nobody—has produced a better parable about the condition of the national consciousness at century’s end.”—The Boston Globe An enduringly brilliant novel of trial and triumph set in America in the 1920s, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster “A charmer pure and simple . . . Nothing less than the story of America itself.”—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Paul Auster’s dazzling, picaresque novel is the story of Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as “Walt the Wonder Boy.” It is the late 1920s, the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone, and Walt is a Saint Louis orphan rescued from 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 ability takes them across a vast and vibrant country, where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Klu 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 again.

A compelling story of love and forgiveness, from the bestselling author of Invisible and The Brooklyn Follies.

The Red Notebook brings together in one volume all of Paul Auster''s short, true-life stories—a remarkable collection of tales that documents the curious, miraculous, and sometimes catastrophic turns of everyday reality. 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.

The Story of My Typewriter is the story of a manual Olympia model that is now more than 25 years old. Paul Auster''s discerning prose is combined with Sam Messer''s illustrations to stun fans of both author and illustrator alike.