Paul Auster Books In Order

New York Trilogy Books In Publication Order

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

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. In the Country of Last Things (1987)
  2. Moon Palace (1989)
  3. Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story (1990)
  4. Leviathan (1992)
  5. Mr. Vertigo (1994)
  6. Dream Days in Hotel (1998)
  7. Timbuktu (1999)
  8. Sophie Calle: Double GameDouble Game (1999)
  9. The Book of Illusions (2002)
  10. Oracle Night (2004)
  11. The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
  12. Travels in the Scriptorium (2005)
  13. Man in the Dark (2008)
  14. Invisible (2009)
  15. Sunset Park (2010)
  16. 4 3 2 1 (2017)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. The Music of Chance (1990)
  2. Blue in the Face (1990)
  3. Smoke (1995)
  4. Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
  5. The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2000)
  6. Collected Screenplays (2010)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. White Spaces (1980)
  2. The Art of Hunger (1983)
  3. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (With: Joseph Joubert) (1983)
  4. The Invention of Solitude (1985)
  5. The Red Notebook (1993)
  6. Why Write? (1996)
  7. Translations (1997)
  8. Paul Auster’s New York (With: Frieder Blickle) (1997)
  9. Hand to Mouth (1997)
  10. The Story of My Typewriter (With: Sam Messer) (2002)
  11. Collected Prose (2003)
  12. Winter Journal (2012)
  13. Here and Now (With: J.M. Coetzee) (2012)
  14. Report from the Interior (2013)
  15. A Life in Words (With: I. B. Siegumfeldt) (2017)
  16. Talking to Strangers (2019)
  17. Groundwork (2020)
  18. Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Future Dictionary of America (2004)

New York Trilogy Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Paul Auster Books Overview

City of Glass

A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art SpiegelmanQuinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a post existentialist private eye. An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print. Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster’s groundbreaking, Edgar Award nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.

Ghosts

A fiction writer compiles his essays and interviews with such literary greats as Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, and more in a book that calls attention to the dangerous stakes of writing and undermines accepted notions about literature.

In the Country of Last Things

Here is the story of Anna Blume, a woman who has come to an unnamed city in search of her brother. Her notebook recounts her quest in this cruel modern landscape, and through her anguished narrative, Auster presents a frightening vision of the future.

Moon Palace

Spanning three generations, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit, Moon Palace follows an orphan child of the sixties as he seeks the key to his past and the answers to the riddle of his fate.

Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story

A timeless, utterly charming Christmas fable, beautifully illustrated and destined to become a classic When Paul Auster was asked by The New York Times to write a Christmas story for the Op Ed page, the result, ‘Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story,’ led to Auster’s collaboration on a film adaptation, Smoke. Now the story has found yet another life in this enchanting illustrated edition. It begins with a writer’s dilemma: he’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 problem: How to write an unsentimental Christmas story? He unburdens himself to his friend at his local cigar shop, a colorful character named Auggie Wren. ‘A Christmas story? Is that all?’ Auggie counters. ‘If you buy me lunch, my friend, I’ll tell you the best Christmas story you ever heard. And I guarantee every word of it is true.’And an unconventional story it is, involving a lost wallet, a blind woman, and a Christmas dinner. Everything gets turned upside down. What’s stealing? What’s giving? What’s a lie? What’s the truth? It’s vintage Auster, and pure pleasure: a truly unsentimental but completely affecting tale.

Leviathan

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’.

Mr. Vertigo

The author of Leviathan returns with a dazzling, picaresque, new novel in which Walter Claireborne Rawley, now an octogenarian, recounts his extraordinary vaudevillian adventures as ‘Walt the Wonder Boy’ in 1924. ‘One hears every page of this novel, and sees it as well.’ Washington Post.

Timbuktu

Meet Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster’s remarkable new novel, Timbuktu. Mr. Bones is the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, the brilliant, troubled, and altogether original poet saint from Brooklyn. Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza before them, they sally forth on a last great adventure, heading for Baltimore, Maryland in search of Willy’s high school teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who knew him in his previous incarnation as William Gurevitch, the son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs. Swanson still alive? And if she isn’t, what will prevent Willy from vanishing into that other world known as Timbuktu?Mr. Bones is our witness. Although he walks on four legs and cannot speak, he can think, and out of his thoughts Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in recent American fiction. By turns comic, poignant, and tragic, Timbuktu is above all a love story. Written with a scintillating verbal energy, it takes us into the heart of a singularly pure and passionate character, an unforgettable dog who has much to teach us about our own humanity.

Sophie Calle: Double GameDouble Game

The original edition of Double Game, published by Violette Editions in 1999, was the first important book by Sophie Calle to be published in English and earned fervent international praise for its concept, content and stunning design. Writing for Bookforum, Barry Schwabsky called ‘this elegant, ribbon wrapped compendium My vote for the most beautiful art book of 1999.’ And Eye magazine judged it, ‘That rare thing, an artist’s monograph that is actually a work of art in and of itself, a furthering of Calle’s vision.’ That edition quickly sold out and has since been out of print. This new edition, published to coincide with the 2007 Venice Biennale, at which Calle will represent France, is identical in content to the first, and reprises all of the cherished qualities of the original in a smaller hardback format including the signature ribbon around its middle. The story begins with Maria, the fictional character in Paul Auster’s novel, Leviathan. Most of Maria’s ‘works’ are, in fact, based on those of Sophie Calle. The first section of Double Game takes us through the few original works by Maria that Sophie makes her own, shown both in their fictional context and illustrated by Calle’s actual reproduction of them. The second section takes the story further into the heart of Calle’s world, with a series of Calle’s seminal narrative and abstract works in text and images that were appropriated by Maria in Leviathan. The third section of the book takes the dialogue directly to Maria’s inventor, Paul Auster, who in turn takes Calle as his subject, inventing for her the Gotham Handbook, which offers ‘Personal Instructions for SC on How to Improve Life in New York City Because she asked…
.’

The Book of Illusions

Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmers interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmers mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexicosupposedly written by Hectors wife. Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit? Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of Americas most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.

Oracle Night

Several months into his recovery from a near fatal illness, thirty four year old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M.R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster’s mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book only flesh and blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man’s imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster’s reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.

The Brooklyn Follies

Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore a far cry from the brilliant academic career he d begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom’s boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York. Through Tom and Harry, Nathan s world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances not to mention a stray relative or two and leads him to a reckoning with his past. Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man. But life takes over instead, and Nathan s despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others. The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster s warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.

Travels in the Scriptorium

Playaway is the easiest way to listen to a book on the go. An all in one format, the player and content are combined in one 2 ounce unit and it comes with everything you need to start listening immediately. No separate player needed, no CDs, no downloads just press play! ‘A man pieces together clues to his past and the identity of his captors in this fantastic, labyrinthine novel. An old man awakens, disoriented, in an unfamiliar chamber. With no memory of who he is or how he has arrived there, he pores over the relics on the desk, examining the circumstances of his confinement and searching his own hazy mind for clues. Determining that he is locked in, the man identified only as Mr. Blank begins reading a manuscript he finds on the desk, the story of another prisoner, set in an alternate world the man doesn’t recognize. Nevertheless, the pages seem to have been left for him, along with a haunting set of photographs. As the day pas*ses, various characters call on the man in his cell vaguely familiar people, some who seem to resent him for crimes he can’t remember and each brings frustrating hints of his identity and his past. All the while an overhead camera clicks and clicks, recording his movements, and a microphone records every sound in the room. Someone is watching. Both chilling and poignant, Travels in the Scriptorium is vintage Auster: mysterious texts, fluid identities, a hidden past, and, somewhere, an obscure tormentor. And yet, as we discover during one day in the life of Mr. Blank, his world is not so different from our own.’

Man in the Dark

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year’Man in the Dark is an undoubted pleasure to read. Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter.’ Michael Dirda, The New York Review of BooksFrom a ‘literary original’ The Wall Street Journal comes a book 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. Seventy two year old August Brill is recovering from a car accident at 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 desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Paul Auster is the bestselling author of The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded The Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix M dicis tranger for Leviathan. He has also been short listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award The Book of Illusions, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction The Music of Chance, and the Edgar Award City of Glass. His work has been translated into thirty five languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary AwardA work of fiction with a dark political twist, Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark speaks to the realities that America inhabits as wars flame around the world. 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.

Invisible

One of America’s greatest novelists dazzlingly reinvents the coming of age story in his most passionate and surprising book to dateSinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty year old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of America s most spectacularly inventive writers.

Sunset Park

Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse. An enigmatic young man employed as a trash out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families.A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler’s 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives.A celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway. An independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts. Sunset Park is a surprising departure that confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers.

The Music of Chance

From one of America’s most original and startlingly imaginative writers, a novel with ‘all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.’ The New York Times. A fireman and a gambler enter a poker game with two rich eccentrics, ‘risking everything on the single blind turn of a card.’ What results is the product of a world of fiendish bargains and punitive whims.

Blue in the Face

Two stories which have been made into films. In ‘Smoke’ a novelist, suffering from writer’s block and the violent death of his wife, is inspired by a young black boy to write again. The action of ‘Blue in the Face‘ partly takes place in the cigar shop which was the focal point of ‘Smoke’.

Lulu on the Bridge

The insider’s guide and perfect companion to the new film starring Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Vanessa Redgrave. Stunning and surreal, Lulu on the Bridge is a romantic mystery with a lot on its mind. It is the story of Izzy and Celia, two lonely, wounded, and mismatched strangers, transformed into soul mates by the uncanny powers of a phosphorescent stone. Destiny, as well as some bizarre and near tragic circumstances, conspire to keep the lovers apart. But the audience and reader are privy to a grand and surprising finale that explains all. Thought provoking, intriguing, and utterly romantic, Lulu on the Bridge offers a lyrical meditation on what distinguishes chance from fate, reality from illusion, and life from death. Following on the success of the screenplay cornpanion to Smoke and Blue in the Face, this book contains the shooting script; an interview with Paul Auster by Rebecca Prime; interviews with the producer, costume designer, editor, director of photography, and production designer; and stills from the film.

The Inner Life of Martin Frost

A Picador Paperback Original A new movie written and directed by Paul Auster, starring David Thewlis, Irene Jacob, Michael Imperioli, and Sophie Auster. From The New York Trilogy to The Book of Illusions and Travels in the Scriptorium, Paul Auster is one of America’s most spectacularly inventive novelists. Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge established him as an award winning filmmaker. The Inner Life of Martin Frost brings together his talents as a novelist and filmmaker with a work that is tender, moving, and funny. Searching for solitude, the writer Martin Frost borrows a friend’s country house. Waking up one morning, he is shocked to find a nearly naked young woman beside him in bed. She also has a key to the house and claims to be the owner’s niece. Martin’s initial annoyance at Claire’s intrusion is rapidly forgotten as he falls passionately in love with her. Even when it is revealed that Claire is not who she claims to be, their idyllic passion continues until she suddenly falls ill. The Inner Life of Martin Frost is based on an imaginary film that appears in his novel The Book of Illusions. Unlike the fictional Hector Spelling’s ‘lost’ 1946 black and white film of the same title, Auster’s luminous celebration of the mysteries of love, art, and the imagination will be released in 2007.

The Art of Hunger

Now including The Red Notebook a collection of autobiographical sketches on coincidence The Art of Hunger undermines our accepted notions about literature. Auster’s meditations on writing and artists leads us to a better understanding of the toll of writing.

The Invention of Solitude

‘One day there is life…
and then, suddenly, it happens there is death’. So begins The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster’s moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. After the death of his own father, Auster discovers a 60 year old family murder mystery that could account for the old man’s elusive character. Later the book shifts from Auster’s identity as son to his own role as father.

The Red Notebook

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.

Hand to Mouth

Paul Auster’s Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinating and often funny memoir about his early years as a writer struggling to be published, and to make enough money to survive. Leaving high school with ‘itchy feet’ and refusing to play it safe, Auster avoided convention and the double life of steady office employment while writing. From the streets of New York City, Dublin, and Paris to a surreal adventure in a dusty village in Mexico, Auster’s account of living on next to nothing introduces an unforgettable cast of characters while examining what it means to be a writer.

The Story of My Typewriter (With: Sam Messer)

This is the story of Paul Auster’s typewriter. The typewriter is a manual Olympia, more than 25 years old, and has been the agent of transmission for the novels, stories, collaborations, and other writings Auster has produced since the 1970s, a body of work that stands as one of the most varied, creative, and critcally acclaimed in recent American letters. It is also the story of a relationship. A relationship between Auster, his typewriter, and the artist Sam Messer, who, as Auster writes, ‘has turned an inanimate object into a being with a personality and a presence in the world.’ This is also a collaboration: Auster’s story of his typewriter, and of Messer’s welcome, though somewhat unsettling, intervention into that story, illustrated with Messer’s muscular, obsessive drawings and paintings of both author and machine. This is, finally, a beautiful object; one that will be irresistible to lovers of Auster’s writing, Messer’s painting, and fine books in general. ‘It was never my intention to turn my typewriter into a heroic figure. That is the work of Sam Messer.’ Paul Auster 30 color. 6 x 8.5 in.

Collected Prose

An updated edition with six new essays, including ‘An Evening at Shea’ and ‘Remembering Beckett,’ as well as two long interviews from ‘one of America’s greats’ Time Out Chicago The celebrated author of Invisible, The New York Trilogy, and The Book of Illusions presents a highly personal collection of essays, prefaces, true stories, autobiographical writings including the seminal work The Invention of Solitude, and collaborations with artists, as well as occasional pieces written for magazines and newspapers. 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 Future Dictionary of America

This book was conceived by Safran Foer Foer, Nicole Krauss, and Dave Eggers as a way to bring over a hundred authors together to promote progressive causes in the November 2004 election. The book is an imagining of what a dictionary might look like about thirty years hence, when all of the world’s problems are solved and our current president is a distant memory. The book is by turns funny, outraged, utopian, and dyspeptic. Over 150 writers contributed to the book, including: Stephen King, Robert Olen Butler, Glen David Gold, Richard Powers, Susan Straight, Sarah Vowell, Billy Collins, C.K. Williams, Colson Whitehead, Donald Antrim, Jonathan Franzen, Edwidge Danticat, Edward Hirsch, Joyce Carol Oates, Katha Pollitt, Padgett Powell, Paul Auster, Anthony Swofford, Julia Alvarez, Susan Choi, Jim Shepard, Aimee Bender, and Art Spiegelman. Hardcover editions of the book will also include a CD compilation, with all new songs by the best musicians working. Among them: David Byrne, R.E.M., Death Cab for Cutie, Moby, Sleater Kinney, Flaming Lips, Tom Waits, Yo La Tengo, Bright Eyes, They Might Be Giants, Elliott Smith, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

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