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Paul Auster

(b.1947)

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1947 to middle class parents. After attending Columbia University he lived in France for four years. Since returning to America in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels and translations.

Genres: Mystery, Literary Fiction

Series

New York Trilogy
   1. City of Glass (1985)
   2. Ghosts (1986)
   3. The Locked Room (1986)

Novels

   In the Country of Last Things (1987)
   Moon Palace (1989)
   Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1992)
   Leviathan (1992)
   Mr. Vertigo (1994)
   Dream Days in Hotel (1998)
   Timbuktu (1999)
   Sophie Calle: Double Game (1999)
   The Book of Illusions (2002)
   Oracle Night (2003)
   The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
   Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)
   Man in the Dark (2008)
   Invisible (2009)
   Sunset Park (2010)
   4 3 2 1 (2017)

Omnibus

   Smoke / Blue in the Face (1995)
   Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge (2003)
   Collected Novels Volume 1 (2004)
   Collected Novels Volume 2 (2005)
   Collected Novels Volume 3 (2008)
   Day / Night (2013)
   Collected Novels Volume 4 (2015)

Collections

   Wall Writing (poems) (1976)
   Facing the Music (poems) (1980)
   Disappearances (poems) (1988)
   Ground Work (1990)
   Selected Poems (poems) (1998)
   Collected Poems (poems) (2004)

Plays

   The Music of Chance (1990)
   Blue in the Face (1995)
   Smoke (1995)
   Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
   The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2006)
   Collected Screenplays (2010)

Anthologies edited

   The Random House Book of Twentieth Century Poetry (1982)
   I Thought My Father Was God (2001)
   True Tales of American Life (2001)

Non fiction

   White Spaces (1980)
   The Art of Hunger (1983)
   The Notebooks of Jeseph Joubert (1983)
   The Invention of Solitude (1985)
   The Red Notebook (1992)
   Why Write? (1996)
   Translations (1997)
   Paul Auster's New York (1997)
   Hand to Mouth (1997)
   The Story of My Typewriter (2001)
   Collected Prose (2003)
   Winter Journal (2012)
   Here and Now (2012) (with J M Coetzee)
   Report from the Interior (2013)
   A Life in Words (2017) (with I B Siegumfeldt)
   Talking to Strangers (2019)
   Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979-2012 (2020)
   Burning Boy (2021)
   Long Live King Kobe (2022) (with Spencer Ostrander)

Awards

	Edgar Awards Best Novel nominee (1986) : City of Glass
	International IMPAC Dublin Literary Awards Best Novel nominee (2004) : The Book of Illusions
	Booker Prize Best Novel nominee (2017) : 4 3 2 1

Paul Auster recommends

Life (1978)
Georges Perec
"A dazzling, crazy-quilt monument to the imagination."

The Living End (1979)
Stanley Elkin
"Stanley Elkin's imagination should be declared a national landmark. When the moment comes to write the history of AMerican English in the late twentieth century, his novels will be a fundamental source."

The Seducer (2003)
(Jonas Wergeland, book 1)
Jan Kjærstad
"An enormously accomplished and compelling novel."

The Gift of Numbers (2007)
Yôko Ogawa
"Highly original. Infinitely charming. And ever so touching."

The Evening Road (2017)
Laird Hunt
"Magnificent."

My Heart (2021)
Semezdin Mehmedinović
"Semezdin Memedinovic charts the collapse of a world with heartbreaking clarity and precision . . . conveys the same clear-eyed passion for the truth that one finds in the young Hemingway, the Hemingway of our time."

The Stone World (2022)
Joel Agee
"Joel Agee's astonishing new novel is one of the purest, most penetrating explorations of childhood I have ever read. Driven by a prose almost transparent in its clarity, the book takes us so deep into the inner life of its six-year-old protagonist that the customary boundaries between writer and reader, reader and text, text and truth dissolve. We are inside the inside and therefore outside ourselves - at one with the book. The Stone World is more than a great literary achievement, it is a remarkable human achievement as well."

The Opposition (2022)
Todd Gitlin
"I read Todd Gitlin's novel in a great rush of enthusiasm and awe, thoroughly caught up in the lives of his characters and his vivid portrayal of 1960s America--with all of the tumult, rage, and hope of that time. No one understands that time better than Todd Gitlin, who has written about it extensively in his previously lauded books, but now that he has turned his hand to fiction, the result is even more vivid, more thrilling, and I for one would urge every person I know to read it."

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