Paul Auster's noirish trilogy emphasizes the fragility and mysteriousness of identity. In each short novel, a detective figure haunts a man caught up in a web of strange events which he may or may not have orchestrated himself.
A detective-story writer named Quinn becomes involved in a bizarre case. A phone call from a man who believes someone is trying to kill him leads to a case more mysterious than anything Quinn could concoct. In this tale of strange reversals and shifts of identity, a character named "Paul Auster" makes an appearance as a man obsessed with Quinn's ...
The 180 stories collected here were solicited in 1999 by Paul Auster, novelist and host of National Public Radio's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, as part of the National Story Project, in which the radio audience was invited to send true stories. This selection includes poignant stories about real events, and observations of the uncanny in life.
A detective-story writer named Quinn becomes involved in a bizarre case. A phone call from a man who believes someone is trying to kill him leads to a case more mysterious than anything Quinn could concoct. In this tale of strange reversals and shifts of identity, a character named "Paul Auster" makes an appearance as a man obsessed with Quinn's ...
David Zimmer, a literature professor, loses his wife and children in an accident, and afterwards buries his grief by devoting himself to the writing of a book about a silent-film star named Hector Mann. Surprisingly, Mann turns out to be alive, and eager to meet Zimmer and tell the remains of his story, some of which sounds oddly familiar to ...
Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.
In this novel-with-footnotes, the narrator, Sidney Orr, is writing a work based on one of Dashiell Hammett's noir stories. Orr alternates between the tale he is writing and his real life, which becomes increasingly mysterious and which, in some ways, begins to mirror other well-known works of literature. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.
Meet Walt, the orphan from the mid-West who is set on the road to stardom by the dark and mesmerizing figure of Master Yehudi. When the Master takes little Walt back to the mysterious house on the great plains, he initiates the tutorial process that will culminate in Walt learning to fly.
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.
An early memoir consisting of two parts: "Portrait of an Invisible Man", in which Auster explores his own sometimes shocking family history, particularly the death of the complex man who was his father; and "The Book of Memory", in which, by examining his own life, he writes about the concept of memory.
In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Beckett's birth, these volumes bring together nearly every word the poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright and critic ever published.
Paul Auster gathers his autobiographical writings and his criticism in this hefty volume. Ranging from his brilliant early work THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE to a discussion of the fiction of Knut Hamsun, Auster's writing is interesting both in itself and as an adjunct to his fiction, illuminating his plots, his hangups, and his major themes.
This Dickensian novel tells the strange story of Marco Stanley Fogg: his trials of poverty and depression; his rescue by Kitty Wu, a beautiful Chinese woman; and his eventual position as a live-in companion to an old man. Marco's recording of the old man's life story becomes his obsession as well as the focus of the novel.
Both chilling and poignant, this labyrinthine novel by the author of "Leviathan" follows a man who awakens disoriented in an unfamiliar chamber, as he pieces together clues to his past--and the identity of his captors.
Jim Nashe, a Boston firefighter abandoned by his wife, inherits money that he promptly squanders on an aimless, endless drive across America. Close to desperation, he meets a bitter young itinerant card sharp, Jack Pozzi, who lures him into a poker game with two shady recluses, Flower and Stone, on their Pennsylvania estate. Nashe and Pozzi lose ...
The explosion at the start of this book ends the life of its hero, Benjamin Sachs, and brings two FBI agents to the home of one of Sachs's oldest friends, the writer Peter Aaron. What follows is Aaron's story, an investigation of another man's life. By the author of "Moon Palace".
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's other work includes "The New York Trilogy" and "Hand to Mouth", and the screenplays "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face".
It begins with a writer's dilemmaQhe's been asked by "The New York Times" to write a story that will appear in the paper on Christmas morning. The writer agrees, but he has a problemQhow does one write an unsentimental Christmas story? The result is Auster's timeless, utterly charming Christmas fable, beautifully illustrated and destined to become ...
Edited by Paul Auster, this four-volume set of Beckett's canon has been designed by award-winner Laura Lindgren. Available individually, as well as in a boxed set, the four hardcover volumes have been specially bound with covers featuring images central to Beckett's works. Typographical errors that remained uncorrected in the various prior ...
"Not only is it the finest first novel I have read in many years, but it is, quite simply, one of the most original and brilliantly executed works of fiction by any contemporary writer I know of."--Paul Auster "An infrared view of Sex and the City, a snapshot plunged in an acrid bath."--Globe and Mail "With an extraordinary sense of the ...
From "The New York Trilogy" to" The Book of Illusions," Paul Auster's novels have earned him a reputation as "one of American's most spectacularly inventive writers." Here, published together for the first time, are the screenplays of the three films he made in the 1990s. "Smoke "(starring Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, and ...
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