Books by Paul Auster and Complete Book Reviews

Paul Auster. Penguin Books, $5.95 (96p) ISBN 978-0-14-778149-9
In this second novel of the author's New York trilogy, a private eye named Blue is hired by White to follow and report on Black, but Black does little more than sit in his apartment and writeleading Blue to intervene in his life. ""Carried along by...
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Paul Auster, Author Sun and Moon Press $13.95 (203p) ISBN 978-0-940650-52-7
We don't know much about Daniel Quinn. We do know that he is 35, and that at one time he had a wife and son, who are now dead. He writes mysteries under the pseudonym of William Wilson, and when a stranger phones asking to speak to Paul Auster,...
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Paul Auster, Author . New Directions $10.95 (103p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1498-8
The arresting stories in this slim collection by Auster (The New York Trilogy, etc.) go a long way toward answering the perennial question "Why write?" The book contains four short narratives: "The Red Notebook," "It Don't...
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Paul Auster, Author Sun & Moon $24.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-55713-056-3
``Writing is no longer an act of free will for me, it's a matter of survival,'' declares Auster in this collection, which serves as a kind of literary autobiography. Best known for his novels ( Leviathan ), Auster describes in interviews how he...
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Paul Auster, Author Henry Holt & Company $25 (368p) ISBN 978-0-8050-5406-4
Auster, the highly talented novelist (New York Trilogy), poet and filmmaker (Smoke) was not always as successful as he is now, and the title section of this oddly conceived book (most of which is comprised of Auster's unpublished work) is a...
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Paul Auster, Author Penguin Books $13.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-14-026750-1
The novelist supplies a literary autobiography in essays and interviews. (Sept.)
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Paul Auster, Author Henry Holt & Company $22 (181p) ISBN 978-0-8050-5407-1
The always surprising and astute Auster (New York Trilogy; Mr. Vertigo) wrings one of his most poignant, immediate novels from the mind of an intelligent mutt named Mr. Bones who faces the crisis of a lifetime in the death of his deranged master and
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Paul Auster, Author Sun and Moon Press $12.95 (102p) ISBN 978-0-940650-70-1
This is the second novel in the author's New York Trilogy, the first of which, City of Glass, was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America's ""Edgar'' award. Here, a private eye named Blue is hired by White to follow and report on Black. Blue's...
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Paul Auster, Author Viking Books $15.95 (188p) ISBN 978-0-670-81445-9
Imagine an American city in the near future, populated almost wholly by street dwellers, squatters in ruined buildings, scavengers for subsistence. Suicide clubs offer interesting ways to die, for a fee, but the rich have fled with their jewels, and
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Paul Auster, Author Sun and Moon Press $13.95 (179p) ISBN 978-0-940650-76-3
In this final volume of his haunting New York Trilogy (City of Glass and Ghosts each representing different aspects of the same story), poet and novelist Auster deepens his exploration of the writer's mind. The narrator here gets a summons from...
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Paul Auster, Author Viking Books $18.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-670-82509-7
The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked, throughout this elegant fiction by award-winning novelist and poet Auster ( The New York Trilogy ; The Invention of Solitude ). Marco Fogg is a...
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Paul Auster, Author Viking Books $12.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-670-83535-5
Auster's ( Moon Palace ; the New York Trilogy) offbeat and strangely compelling black comedy invites speculation about the counterpointing of choice and chance, and carries resonances of Samuel Beckett. With a windfall of nearly $200,000, Jim Nashe...
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Paul Auster, Author Viking Books $21 (288p) ISBN 978-0-670-84676-4
Auster ( The Music of Chance ) captivatingly renews a theme central to his acclaimed New York Trilogy and Moon Palace --that of the other, the shadow self whose parallel life somehow jumps the track and threatens the more sober protagonist. After...
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Paul Auster, Author Viking Books $21.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-670-85209-3
It will come as no surprise to the gifted Auster's ( Moon Palace ; The Music of Chance ) many fans that walking on air, the implausible premise of his marvelously whimsical seventh novel, is treated with convincing gravity. Walt Rawley recounts his...
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Paul Auster, Author Burning Deck $0 (58p) ISBN 978-1-886224-14-8
Through childhood memories, stories about his children and anecdotes drawn from his career, novelist Auster (Moon Palace) searches for the motivation that forces him to write. Whether he's recalling his disappointment when Willie Mays refused to...
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Paul Auster. Holt, $27 (340p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9857-0
In this companion to an earlier memoir also written in the second person, Winter Journal, Auster returns to many of the concerns of his 1950s childhood in South Orange, N.J., that ran like leitmotivs through his young life and helped forge the...
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Paul Auster. Holt, $32 (880p) ISBN 978-1-62779-446-6
Almost everything about Auster’s new novel is big. The sentences are long and sinuous; the paragraphs are huge, often running more than a page; and the book comes in at nearly 900 pages. In its telling, however, the book is far from epic, though it...
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Paul Auster, Author Penguin Books $15 (320p) ISBN 978-0-14-011585-7
Marco Fogg, loner and dreamer, is forced from his Manhattan apartment and roams Central Park as a vagrant until he is rescued by gentle Kitty Wu. ``The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked,
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Paul Auster, Author . Holt $23 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8050-7320-1
One morning in September 1982, a struggling novelist recovering from a near-fatal illness purchases, on impulse, a blue notebook from a new store in his Brooklyn neighborhood. So begins Auster's artful, ingenious 12th novel, which is both a...
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Paul Auster, Author . Overlook $24.95 (192p) ISBN 978-1-58567-404-6
Before embarking as a novelist, young Paul Auster (City of Glass) published poetry in a variety of small journals and magazines. This handy volume collects all his verse from the late 1960s through 1980. It's poetry very much of its period,...
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Paul Auster, Author . Holt $24 (306p) ISBN 978-0-8050-7714-8
Nathan Glass, a retired life insurance salesman estranged from his family and facing an iffy cancer prognosis, is "looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn." What he finds, though, in this ebullient novel by Brooklyn...
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Paul Auster, Author . Holt $22 (145p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8145-9
On the centennial year of Samuel Beckett's birth, Auster's new novel nods to the old master. We open with a man sitting in a room. The man doesn't remember his name, and a camera hidden in the ceiling takes a picture of him once a second.
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Paul Auster, Author . Holt $23 (180p) ISBN 978-0-8050-8839-7
A retired book critic is targeted by an assassin from an alternate universe in Auster's flawed latest. August Brill lies awake in his daughter's Vermont home, making up stories to fight against insomnia and depression. The stories coalesce
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Paul Auster, Author . Holt $25 (308p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9080-2
In his latest, Auster is in classic form, perhaps too perfectly satisfying the contention of his wearied protagonist: “there is far more poetry in the world than justice.” Adam Walker, a poetry student at Columbia in the spring of 1967,...
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Paul Auster, Holt, $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9286-8
Auster (Invisible) is in excellent form for this foray into the tarnished, conflicted soul of Brooklyn. New York native Miles Heller now cleans out foreclosed south Florida homes, but after falling in love with an underage girl and stirring the...
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Paul Auster, Author Penguin Books $15 (208p) ISBN 978-0-14-009731-3
When a stranger calls on Daniel Quinn's phone asking to speak to Paul Auster (supposedly a detective), Quinn claims to be Auster and soon is drawn into a case involving a man who fears his father is trying to kill him. ""An impressive if not major...
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Paul Auster, Author Penguin Books $15 (224p) ISBN 978-0-14-015407-8
Compulsive traveler Jim Nashe finances an epic poker match for a self-proclaimed jackpot winner. ``In his lucid, captivating yarn, Auster quietly raises disturbing questions of servants and masters, of loyalty, freedom and the inexplicable urge to...
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Paul Auster, Author, Paul Auster, Read by , read by the author. Macmillan Audio $24.95 (0p) ISBN 978-1-4272-0551-3
Auster, a man of diverse creative achievements, defies convenient labels with regard to genre and the divisions between literary fiction and the mainstream popular marketplace. Given his experiences with such multimedia endeavors as National Public...
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Paul Auster, read by the author, Macmillan Audio, unabridged, seven CDs, 8.5 hrs., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-4272-1069-2
Auster's dry, gravelly voice has a gravitas all its own. He reads his novel about Miles Heller, hiding out from the authorities in the titular Brooklyn neighborhood, interspersed with discursions on film and baseball, fate and chance. While Auster...
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Paul Auster, read by the author. Macmillan Audio, unabridged, six CDs, 6.5 hrs., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-4272-2576-4
In this captivating memoir, Auster tells his own story, recalling early years, travels, his first marriage and child, and various family deaths. Finally, he turns his attention to his glamorous and lonely mother and his second wife, novelist and...
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Paul Auster, read by the author. Macmillan Audio, unabridged six CDs, 7.5 hrs., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-4272-3334-9
Chronicling his earliest reading and writing to his parents’ unhappy marriage, Auster uses specific moments to extrapolate larger themes and meanings in this memoir that is a companion to Winter Journal. Auster’s narration is impressive, but...
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Paul Auster, Author, Paul Auster, Editor . Holt $24 (336p) ISBN 978-0-8050-5408-8
David Zimmer, an English professor in Vermont, is trying to rebuild his life—after his family perishes in an airplane crash—by researching the work of Hector Mann, a minor figure from the era of silent movies, in this enigmatic,...
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Paul Auster, read by Joe Barrett, Brilliance Audio, unabridged, 11 CDs, 12.5 hrs. $29.99 ISBN 978-1-4233-9578-2
Joe Barrett has the low, gravelly voice of old detective movies. His phrasing is good, his characterizations clear and dramatic, and his rendering of Kafkaesque mysteriousness draws us deeper and deeper into this peculiar, interconnected trilogy....
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Paul Auster. Holt, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-8050-9553-1
“You think,” begins Auster in this quietly moving meditation on death and life, “it will never happen to you.” But because this is not fiction and Auster (Sunset Park) is as human as the rest of us, “one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in...
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Paul Auster, Author, Paul Karasik, Author, D. Mazzucchellil, Author . Picador $14 (144p) ISBN 978-0-312-42360-5
Karasik and Mazzucchelli's 1994 comics adaptation of Auster's existentialist mystery novel, reprinted here with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, has been a cult classic for years. The Comics Journal named it one of the 100 best comics of...
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Paul Auster, Author, Art Spiegelman, Author, Paul Karasik, Author Harper Perennial $12.5 (129p) ISBN 978-0-380-77108-0
Auster's acclaimed novel City of Glass , a dreamlike meditation on language and fiction in the form of a detective novel, has been translated into comics form to stunning effect. And while Karasik's faithful adaptation of Auster's crisp prose...
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Paul Auster, Author, Dick Hill, Read by , read by Dick Hill. Tantor Audio $24.99 (0p) ISBN 978-1-4001-0374-4
This enigmatic interrogation into the life of the sequestered and nameless protagonist referred to as Mr. Blank will leave some listeners perplexed and others awestruck by Auster’s manipulative narrative devices. Trapped within a room, Mr....
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Paul Auster, Author, Sam Messer, Joint Author . D.A.P. $17.95 (72p) ISBN 978-1-891024-32-0
Aspiring writers are often fascinated by the processes and the tools of the professional; in this elegant art book collaboration between writer Auster and painter Messer, they can get a detailed, expressionistic perspective on the old-fashioned...
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Paul Auster, Author, Julia Goschke, Illustrator, Julia Goschke, Adapted by , adapted and illus. by Julia Goschke. Penguin/Minedition $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-0-698-40090-0
Abridged from Auster's 1999 novel of the same name, this wrenching but misguided production follows an existentialist dog named Mr. Bones who finds meaning through self-annihilation. Adopted by a suburban family after the death of his homeless...
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Paul Auster. Picador, $20 trade paper (400p) ISBN 978-1-250-20629-9
Man Booker Prize finalist Auster (4 3 2 1) gathers 44 pieces of nonfiction and essays in this wide-ranging and probing collection. His insightful literary criticism, written in the 1970s and ’80s for Commentary and the New York Review of Books,...
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Paul Auster. Holt, $35 (800p) ISBN 978-1-250-23583-1
Stephen Crane (1871–1900), the author of the classic war novel The Red Badge of Courage, cuts a dashing figure in this beguiling literary biography from novelist Auster (Moon Palace). Delving into Crane’s tragically short and impossibly romantic...
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Paul Auster. Grove, $26 (160p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6045-4
Novelist Auster (Burning Boy) and photographer Spencer Ostrander take a powerful look at the causes and consequences of gun violence in America. Interweaving tragic stories and eye-opening statistics (40,000 Americas are killed by guns every year)...
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ARTICLES
  • The Power of Storytelling
  • Split Lives: Paul Auster
  • Open Wounds: PW Talks with Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander
  • Open Wounds: PW Talks with Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander
  • Open Wounds: PW Talks with Paul Auster and Spencer Ostrander
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