Paul Auster

Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987), '' Moon Palace'' (1989), '' The Music of Chance'' (1990), '' The Book of Illusions'' (2002), '' The Brooklyn Follies'' (2005), '' Invisible'' (2009), '' Sunset Park'' (2010), '' Winter Journal'' (2012), and '' 4 3 2 1'' (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Early life

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey,Freeman, John
"At home with Siri and Paul"
, '' The Jerusalem Post'', April 3, 2008. Retrieved September 19, 2008. "Like so many people in New York, both of them are spiritual refugees of a sort. Auster hails from Newark, New Jersey, and Hustvedt from Minnesota, where she was raised the daughter of a professor, among a clan of very tall siblings." son of Samuel Auster, a landlord who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City, and Queenie, née Bogat. His middle-class parents were Jewish, of Austrian descent; the marriage was an unhappy one, and they divorced during Auster's senior year of high school, he moving with his mother and sister to an apartment at Weequahic, Newark. An uncle was the translator Allen Mandelbaum. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.

During the summers of 1958 and 1959, Auster attended, respectively, Camp LakeView (East Brunswick, NJ) and Camp Pontiac (Copake, NY), where his outstanding athletic talents were recognized, especially as a baseball infielder. While attending summer camp, the 14-year-old Auster witnessed what he called the "seminal experience" of his life: a boy being struck by lightning and dying instantly. The boy was standing a few inches away from him at the time. This event changed his life, thinking about it every day.

Career

After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees (English, Comparative Literature) in 1970, he moved to Paris where, among other jobs, he tried to earn a living translating French literature. After returning to the United States in 1974, he continued to work on his poems, essays, and translations of French writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert. His work as a translator led to the publication in 1982 of ''The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry'', which he edited.

Following the appearance in 1982 of his acclaimed debut work, a memoir titled '' The Invention of Solitude'', Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected novellas published collectively as '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987), and is often cited as his most widely known work to the general reading public.

Although ''The New York Trilogy'' gives a nod to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around solving mysteries. Rather, Auster uses the detective form to address questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process. Auster disagrees with this analysis, because he believes that "the ''Trilogy'' grows directly out of ''The Invention of Solitude''".

Similar to the themes explored in ''The New York Trilogy'', the search for identity and personal meaning continued to permeate the three novels Auster published in quick succession in the late 1980s. Whether writing about the relationships between people caught in the flux of an uncertain future and uncertain identity ('' In the Country of Last Things'' 987and '' Moon Palace'' 989, or the role of coincidence and random events in our lives ('' The Music of Chance'' 990, Auster was steadily increasing his readership and popularity.

During the 1990s Auster published three more novels, but he increasingly turned his attention to script writing and filmmaking by way of his screenplay and directorial collaborations with Wayne Wang on '' Smoke'' (which won Auster the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and '' Blue in the Face''. He also directed the movie Lulu on the Bridge (1998).

After a steadfast commitment to filmmaking during the late 1990s, Auster decided to turn his attention once again to writing novels, memoirs, and essays during the remaining two decades of his life. Between 2002 and 2024, Auster published nine novels, two memoirs, an 800-page biography of Stephen Crane (''Burning Boy''), and a sustained jeremiad (Auster calls it a "political pamphlet") on the long, unending history of gun violence in America (''Bloodbath Nation''). Eight of the final ten novels Auster published during his lifetime (from 1999 to 2023) received nominations for the International Dublin Award, and Auster's 2017 novel '' 4 3 2 1'' was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Auster was on the PEN American Center board of trustees from 2004 to 2009 and its vice president from 2005 through 2007.

In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest at its treatment of journalists. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come, or not?" Auster responded: "According to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly one hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragıp Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers around the world."

Auster was willing to give Iranian translators permission to write Persian versions of his works in exchange for a small fee; Iran does not recognize international copyright laws.

One of Auster's later books, ''A Life in Words,'' was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press. It brought together two years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each of Auster's fiction and non-fiction works. It has been a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his works.

Reception

"Over the past twenty-five years", wrote Michael Dirda in '' The New York Review of Books'' in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature". Dirda extolled his virtues in '' The Washington Post'', attesting that Auster had "perfected a limpid, confessional style" and constructed suspenseful, sometimes autobiographical plots. His heroes operated in a world that appeared familiar but they confronted "vague menace and possible hallucination."

Writing about Auster's 2017 novel '' 4 3 2 1'', ''Booklist'' critic Donna Seaman remarked that Auster went beyond conventions of storytelling and mixed genres, even crossing over into filmic modes. She praised the complex sense of wonder and gratitude in his works, which often features "sly humor" in an oeuvre which she considered "a grand experiment, not only in storytelling, but also in the endless nature-versus-nurture debate, the perpetual dance between inheritance and free will, intention and chance, dreams and fate. This elaborate investigation into the big what-if is also a mesmerizing dramatization of the multitude of clashing selves we each harbor within."

The English critic James Wood criticized Auster for what he considered "borrowed language" and "bogus dialogue", nonetheless conceding that Auster was "probably America's best-known postmodern novelist". He noted: "One reads Auster's novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the ''Times'' once called 'all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller'."

Personal life and death

Auster's first marriage was to the writer Lydia Davis in 1974. They had one child together, their son Daniel Auster. By 1979 they were separated and were divorced in 1981. In 1981, Auster married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt. They lived in Brooklyn and had one daughter, Sophie Auster, a singer.

Paul Auster characterized his politics as "far to the left of the Democratic Party", but said he voted Democratic because he doubted a socialist candidate could win. He described right-wing Republicans as "jihadists", and the election of Donald Trump as "the most appalling thing I've seen in politics in my life".

On March 11, 2023, Auster's wife Siri Hustvedt revealed on Instagram that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December 2022, and that he had been treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York since then.

Paul Auster died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn, on April 30, 2024, at the age of 77. He was survived by his wife Siri Hustvedt, their daughter Sophie Auster, his sister Janet Auster, and a grandson.

Awards and honors

* 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère'
* 1990 ''Morton Dauwen Zabel Award'' from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
* 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction shortlist for ''The Music of Chance''
* 1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for ''Leviathan''
* 1995 Independent Spirit award for best first screenplay for ''Smoke''
* 1996 Bodil Awards – Best American Film: '' Smoke''
* 1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence
* 2001 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''Timbuktu''
* 2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
* 2004 International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for ''The Book of Illusions''
* 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature
* 2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature
* 2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège
* 2007 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''The Brooklyn Follies''
* 2007 Commandeur de l' Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
* 2008 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''Travels in the Scriptorium''
* 2009 Premio Leteo (León, Spain)
* 2010 Médaille Grand Vermeil de la ville de Paris
* 2010 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''Man in the Dark''
* 2011 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''Invisible''
* 2012 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''Sunset Park''
* 2012 NYC Literary Honors for fiction
* 2017 Booker Prize Shortlist for "4 3 2 1"
* 2019 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for ''4 3 2 1''

Published works

Fiction

* ''Squeeze Play'' (1982) (written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)
* '' The New York Trilogy'' (1987)
** ''City of Glass'' (1985)
** ''Ghosts'' (1986)
** ''The Locked Room'' (1986)
*'' In the Country of Last Things'' (1987)
*'' Moon Palace'' (1989)
*'' The Music of Chance'' (1990)
* '' Leviathan'' (1992)
* '' Mr. Vertigo'' (1994)
* '' Timbuktu'' (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)
* ''Day/Night'' (2013)
* '' 4 3 2 1'' (2017)
* ''Baumgartner'' (2023)

Memoir

* '' The Invention of Solitude'' (1982)
* ''The Red Notebook'' (1995) (originally printed in Granta (44); 1993)
* ''Hand to Mouth'' (1997)
* '' Winter Journal'' (2012)
* '' Report from the Interior'' (2013)

Nonfiction

* ''The Art of Hunger'' (1992)
* ''Collected Prose'' (contains ''The Invention of Solitude'', ''The Art of Hunger'', ''The Red Notebook'', and ''Hand to Mouth'' as well as various other previously uncollected pieces) (first edition, 2005; expanded second edition, 2010)
* '' Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011'' (2013) A collection of letters exchanged with J. M. Coetzee
* ''A Life in Words: In Conversation with I. B. Siegumfeldt'' (2017)
* ''Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967–2017'' (2019)
* ''Groundwork: Autobiographical Writings, 1979–2012'' (2020)
* '' Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane'' (2021)
* ''Long Live King Kobe: Following the Murder of Tyler Kobe Nichols'' ith photographs by Spencer Ostrander(2022)
* ''Bloodbath Nation'' ith photographs by Spencer Ostrander(2023)

Poetry

* ''Unearth'' (1974)
* ''Wall Writing'' (1976)
* ''Fragments from the Cold'' (1977)
* ''Facing the Music'' (1980)
* ''Disappearances: Selected Poems'' (1988)
* ''Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970–1979'' (1990)
* ''Collected Poems'' (2007)
* ''White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose'' (2020)

Screenplays

* '' Smoke'' (1995)
* '' Blue in the Face'' (1995)
* '' Lulu on the Bridge'' (1998)
* '' The Inner Life of Martin Frost'' (2007)

Edited collections

* ''The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry'' (1982)
* ''True Tales of American Life'' (first published under the title ''I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project'') (2001)

Translations

* ''Fits and Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin'', translated by Paul Auster, Living Hand Editions, 1974
* "The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of André du Bouchet" (1976)
* ''Life/Situations'', by Jean-Paul Sartre (1977) (in collaboration with Lydia Davis)
* ''Aboard the Aquitaine'', by Georges Simenon (1979) (with Lydia Davis)
* '' A Tomb for Anatole'' by Stéphane Mallarmé (1983)
* ''Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians'' (1998) (translation of Pierre Clastres' ethnography ''Chronique des indiens Guayaki'')
* ''Vicious Circles: Two fictions & "After the Fact"'', by Maurice Blanchot, 1999
* ''The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert'' (2005)

Miscellaneous

* ''Auggie Wren's Christmas Story'' (1990)
* '' The Story of My Typewriter'' with paintings by Sam Messer (2002)
* "The Accidental Rebel" (April 23, 2008: article in ''The New York Times'')
* "ALONE" (2015) – Prose piece from 1969 published in six copies along with "Becoming the Other in Translation" (2014) by Siri Hustvedt. Published by Danish small press Ark Editions.

Other media

* In 1993, a movie adaptation of '' The Music of Chance'' was released. Auster features in a cameo role at the end of the film.
* In 1994 ''City of Glass'' was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's close friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.
* In 1998, Auster was the executive producer on the short film ''I Remember'' from filmmaker Avi Zev Weider, who adapted it from Joe Brainard’s book I Remember.
* From 1999 to 2001, Auster was part of NPR's ''National Story Project'', a monthly radio show in which, together With NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, Auster read stories sent in by NPR listeners across America. Listeners were invited to send in stories of "anywhere from two paragraphs to two pages" that "must be true", from which Auster later selected entries, edited them and subsequently read them on the air. Auster read over 4,000 stories submitted to the show, with a few dozen eventually featured on the show and many more anthologized in two 2002 books edited by Auster.
* Jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler's 2001 album ''Hide and Seek'' borrows the words and language from Auster's short play ''Hide and Seek,'' which Mantler found in Auster's ''Hand to Mouth.''
* Don Delillo‘s 2003 novel Cosmopolis is dedicated to Auster.
* Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk and produced by NPR, which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio (2005), and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work (2005).Audio Publishers Association
. Retrieved September 17, 2009.
* Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition '' ... ce qui arrive ... '' (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster reading from his books ''Hand to Mouth'' and ''The Red Notebook'', either as straight recitation, integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play, or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble. A video by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.
* In 2005 his daughter, Sophie, recorded an album of songs in both French and English, entitled ''Sophie Auster'', with the band One Ring Zero, which included a few songs that her father provided the lyrics for.
* Auster's voice may be heard on the 2005 album entitled ''We Must Be Losing It'' by The Farangs. The two tracks are entitled "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".
* In 2006 Auster directed the film '' The Inner Life of Martin Frost'', based on an original screenplay by him. It was shot in Lisbon and Azenhas do Mar and starred David Thewlis, Iréne Jacob, and Michael Imperioli as well as Auster's daughter Sophie. Auster provided the narration, albeit uncredited. The film premiered at the European Film Market, as part of the 2007 Berlinale in Berlin, Germany on February 10, 2007, and opened in New York City on September 7 of the same year.
* The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song "Put A Penny in the Slot" mention Auster and his novella '' Timbuktu''.
* In the 2008 novel '' To the End of the Land'' by David Grossman, the bedroom bookshelf of the central IDF soldier character Ofer is described as prominently displaying several Auster titles.
* In the 2009 documentary '' Act of God'', Auster is interviewed on his experience of watching another boy struck and killed by lightning when he was 14.
* In the 2011 documentary on Charlotte Rampling ''The Look'', Auster meditates on beauty with Rampling on his moored tug boat on the Hudson River.

Notes

References

Further reading

* Paul Auster, Gérard de Cortanze: ''La solitude du labyrinthe''. Paris: Actes Sud, 1997.
* Franchot Ballinger: "Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster". ''MELUS'', 17 (1991–92), pp. 21–38.
* Dennis Barone: "Auster's Memory". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 32–34
* Charles Baxter: "The Bureau of Missing Persons: Notes on Paul Auster's Fiction". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 40–43.
* Harold Bloom (ed.): ''Paul Auster.'' Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publ.; 2004.
* Thorsten Carstensen: "Skepticism and Responsibility: Paul Auster's ''The Book of Illusions''." in: ''Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction'' 58:4 (2017): 411–425.
* Martine Chard-Hutchinson "Paul Auster (1947– )". In: Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (eds). ''Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourceboook''. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 13–20.
* Alain Chareyre-Méjan, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert. "". In: Annick Duperray (ed.). . Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 176–184.
* Gérard de Cortanze, James Rudnick: ''Paul Auster's New York.'' Gerstenberg, New York; Hildesheim, 1998
* Gérard de Cortanze. ''Le New York de Paul Auster''. Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne-Hachette Livre, 1996.
* Robert Creeley: "Austerities". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 35–39.
* Scott Dimovitz: "Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy". ''MFS: Modern Fiction Studies''. 52:3 (Fall 2006): 613–633.
* Scott Dimovitz: "Portraits in Absentia: Repetition, Compulsion, and the Postmodern Uncanny in Paul Auster's Leviathan". ''Studies in the Novel''. 40:4 (Winter 2008): 447–464.
* William Drenttel (ed.): ''Paul Auster: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Checklist of Published Works 1968–1994''. New York: Delos Press, 1994.
* Annick Duperray: ''Paul Auster: Les ambiguïtés de la négation''. Paris: Belin. 2003.
* Christian Eilers: ''Paul Austers autobiographische Werke: Stationen einer Schriftstellerkarriere''. Winter, Heidelberg 2019. (= American Studies – A Monograph Series; 301).
* Sven Gächter: ''Schreiben ist eine endlose Therapie: Der amerikanische Romancier Paul Auster über das allmähliche Entstehen von Geschichten''. Weltwoche (December 31, 1992), p. 30.
* François Gavillon: ''Paul Auster, gravité et légèreté de l'écriture''. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.
* Charles Grandjeat: "". In: Annick Duperray (ed.). . Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 153–163.
* Ulrich Greiner: ''Gelobtes Land. Amerikanische Schriftsteller über Amerika.'' Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1997
* Claude Grimal: "Paul Auster au cœur des labyrinthes". ''Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle'', 68:733 (1990), pp. 64–66.
* Allan Gurganus: "How Do You Introduce Paul Auster in Three Minutes?". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 7–8.
* Anne M. Holzapfel: ''The New York trilogy. Whodunit? Tracking the structure of Paul Auster's anti-detective novels.'' Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996. (= Studien zur Germanistik und Anglistik; 11)
* Beate Hötger: ''Identität im filmischen Werk von Paul Auster.'' Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2002. (= Europäische Hochschulschriften; Reihe 30, 84)
* Heiko Jakubzik: ''Paul Auster und die Klassiker der American Renaissance''. Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg 1999
online text

* Bernd Herzogenrath: ''An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster.'' Amsterdam: Rodopi; 1999
* Bernd Herzogenrath: "Introduction". In: Bernd Herzogenrath. ''An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster''. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 1–11.
* Gerald Howard: ''Publishing Paul Auster''. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 92–95.
* Peter Kirkegaard: "Cities, Signs, Meanings in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster: Or, Never Sure of Any of It", in ''Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies'' 48 (1993): 161179.
* Barry Lewis: "The Strange Case of Paul Auster". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 53–61.
* James Marcus: "Auster! Auster!". ''The Village Voice'', 39 (August 30, 1994), pp. 55–56.
* Brian McHale ''Constructing Postmodernism''. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
* Patricia Merivale: "The Austerized Version". ''Contemporary Literature'', 38:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 185–197.
* Christophe Metress: "". In: Annick Duperray (ed.). . Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 245–257.
*
* James Peacock: "Carrying the Burden of Representation: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions". ''Journal of American Studies'', 40:1 (April 2006), pp. 53–70.
* Werner Reinhart: ''Pikareske Romane der 80er Jahre. Ronald Reagan und die Renaissance des politischen Erzählens in den USA. (Acker, Auster, Boyle, Irving, Kennedy, Pynchon).'' Narr, Tübingen 2001
* William Riggan: ''Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.
* Mark Rudman: "Paul Auster: Some Elective Affinities". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 44–45.
* Michael Rutschky: "Die Erfindung der Einsamkeit: Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Paul Auster"'. ''Merkur'', 45 (1991), pp. 1105–1113.
* Edward H. Schafer: "Ways of Looking at the Moon Palace". ''Asia Major''. 1988; 1(1):1–13.
* Steffen Sielaff: ''Die postmoderne Odyssee. Raum und Subjekt in den Romanen von Paul Auster.'' Univ. Diss., Berlin 2004.
* Joseph C. Schöpp: ''Ausbruch aus der Mimesis: Der amerikanische Roman im Zeichen der Postmoderne''. München: Fink, 1990.
* Motoyuki Shibata: "Being Paul Auster's Ghost". In: Dennis Barone (ed.). ''Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster''. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 183–188.
* Ilana Shiloh: "Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere." New York, Peter Lang 2000.
* Carsten Springer: ''Crises. The works of Paul Auster.'' Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2001. (= American culture; 1)
* Carsten Springer: ''A Paul Auster Sourcebook.'' Frankfurt a. Main u. a., Peter Lang, 2001.
* Eduardo Urbina: ''La ficción que no cesa: Paul Auster y Cervantes.'' Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007.
* Eduardo Urbina: "La ficción que no cesa: Cervantes y Paul Auster". ''Cervantes en el ámbito anglosajón''. Eds. Diego Martínez Torrón and Bernd Dietz. Madrid: SIAL Ediciones, 2005. 433–42.
* Eduardo Urbina: "Reflejos lunares, o la transformación paródica de la locura quijotesca en Moon Palace (1989) de Paul Auster". ''Siglos dorados; Homenaje an Augustin Redondo''. Ed. Pierre Civil. Madrid: Castalia, 2004. 2: 1417–25.
* Eduardo Urbina: "Parodias cervantinas: el Quijote en tres novelas de Paul Auster (La ciudad de cristal, El palacio de la luna y El libro de las ilusiones)". ''Calamo currente': Homenaje a Juan Bautista de Avalle Arce''. Ed. Miguel Zugasti. RILCE (Universidad de Navarra) 23.1 (2007): 245–56.
* Eduardo Urbina: "Reading Matters: Quixotic Fiction and Subversive Discourse in Paul Auster's ''The Book of Illusions''". ''Critical Reflections: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature in Honor of James A. Parr''. Eds. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 57–66.
* Various authors: Special edition on Paul Auster. ''Critique''. 1998 Spring; 39(3).
* Aliki Varvogli: ''World That is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction''. Liverpool University Press, 2001.
* Florian Felix Weyh: "Paul Auster". ''Kritisches Lexikon der fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur'' (26. Nachlieferung), pp. 1–10.
* Curtis White: "The Auster Instance: A Ficto-Biography". ''The Review of Contemporary Fiction'', 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 26–29.
* Eric Wirth: "A Look Back from the Horizon". In: Dennis Barone (ed.). ''Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster''. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 171–182.

External links

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interview with ''The Guardian'' in May 1999
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'An Interview with Paul Auster'
interview with '' 3:AM Magazine'' in November 2001

'Dem old Bush blues'
interview with ''The Times'' in April 2004
* , interview in the '' Oxonian Review'' in June 2004

'Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt in conversation'
at the Key West Literary Seminar in September 2007 (audio)

George Dunford interviews Paul Auster
interview with ''Cordite Poetry Review'' in August 2008

Interview: Paul Auster on His Newest Novel, Man in the Dark - Sound of the City - Village Voice
'Interview: Paul Auster on His Newest Novel, ''Man in the Dark], interview with '' Village Voice'' in September 2008

Interview with Auster
discussing '' Man in the Dark'' with George Miller in November 2008 (audio)

'The mechanics of reality'
discussion between Paul Auster and school students in January 2009 (includes audio)

A career evaluation
of Auster and his new memoir at Open Letters Monthly


piece by Auster at ''The Guardian'', November 6, 2006. The subtitle reads: "one of America's greatest living novelists, argues that fiction is 'magnificently useless', but the act of creation and the pleasure of reading are incomparable human joys that we should savour"

Paul Auster
Bio, excerpts, interviews and articles in the archives of the Prague Writers' Festival

'Dossier – ''The Brooklyn Follies
a collection of essays on Paul Auster's ''The Brooklyn Follies'' (English and French), on ''La Clé des Langues''
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How I Became a Writer. An interview with Paul Auster, 2015
Video by Louisiana Channel

Bookworm
Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt
January 1993October 1999December 2002

Sauli Niinistö & Paul Auster.
An interview conducted in 2017 by the President of Finland. Yleisradio.

Finding aid to the National Story Project records at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
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