Paul Auster

American writer and film director

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American writer and film director. 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 forty languages.

1 Early life
2 Career
- 2.1 Themes
3 Reception
4 Personal life
5 Awards
6 Published works
- 6.1 Fiction
- 6.2 Nonfiction
- 6.3 Poetry
- 6.4 Screenplays
- 6.5 Edited collections
- 6.6 Translations
- 6.7 Miscellaneous
7 Other media
8 Notes
9 References
10 Further reading
11 External links

Early life

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle-cl* parents of Polish descent, Queenie (née Bogat) and Samuel Auster. He is the first cousin of the late political writer Lawrence Auster, with whom he attended high school and university, two years apart. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey, and Newark, and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewood.

Career

After graduating from Columbia University with B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1970, he moved to Paris, France, where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the United States in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels, as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

Auster greeting Israeli President Shimon Peres with Salman Rushdie and Caro Llewellyn in 2008

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir *led The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. Although these books allude to the detective genre they are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential questions of iden*y, space, language, and literature creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. According to Auster, "...the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."

The search for iden*y and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between people and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, from Oracle Night (2003) to 4 3 2 1 (2017), have also met with critical acclaim.

He was on the PEN American Center Board of Trustees from 2004 to 2009, and Vice President during 2005 to 2007.

In 2012, Auster said in an interview that he would not visit Turkey, in protest of its treatment of journalists. The 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's most recent book, A Life in Words, was published in October 2017 by Seven Stories Press. It brings together three years of conversations with the Danish scholar I.B. Siegumfeldt about each one of his works, both fiction and non-fiction. It is a primary source for understanding Auster's approach to his work.

Auster is 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.

Themes

Much of the early scholarship about Auster's work saw links between it and the theories of such French writers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and others. Auster himself has denied these influences and has *erted in print that "I've read only one short essay by Lacan, the 'Purloined Letter,' in the Yale French Studies issue on poststructuralism—all the way back in 1966." Other scholars have seen influences in Auster's work of the American transcendentalists of the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Henry David T*au and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The transcendentalists believed that the symbolic order of civilization has separated us from the natural order of the world, and that by moving into nature, as T*au did, as he described in Walden, it would be possible to return to this natural order.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Auster has specifically referred to characters from Poe and Hawthorne in his novels, for example William Wilson in City of Gl* or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy.

Paul Auster's recurring themes include:

coincidence
frequent portrayal of an ascetic life
a sense of imminent disaster
an obsessive writer as central character or narrator
loss of the ability to understand
loss of language
loss of money – having a lot, but losing it little by little without earning any more
depiction of daily and ordinary life
failure
absent father
writing and story telling, metafiction
intertextuality
American history
American space

Reception

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined 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 also has extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

Ever since City of Gl*, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots – drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit, and autobiography – keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.

Writing about Auster's most recent novel, 4 3 2 1, Booklist critic Donna Seaman remarked:

Auster has been turning readers' heads for three decades, bending the conventions of storytelling, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography, infusing novels with literary and cinematic allusions, and calling attention to the art of storytelling itself, not with cool, intellectual remove, but rather with wonder, gra*ude, daring, and sly humor. ... Auster's fiction is rife with cosmic riddles and rich in emotional complexity. He now presents his most capacious, demanding, eventful, suspenseful, erotic, structurally audacious, funny, and soulful novel to date. ... Auster is conducting 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 mul*ude of clashing selves we each harbor within. ... A paean to youth, desire, books, creativity, and unpredictability, it is a four-faceted bildungsroman and an ars poetica, in which Auster elucidates his devotion to literature and art. He writes, 'To combine the strange with the familiar: that was what Ferguson aspired to, to observe the world as closely as the most dedicated realist and yet to create a way of seeing the world through a different, slightly distorting lens.' Auster achieves this and much more in his virtuoso, magnanimous, and ravishing opus.

The English critic James Wood, however, offered Auster little praise:

Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. "Madame Bovary" actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary's conversation is likened to a pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature, violently conscious of m* culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of borrowed tissue, full of other people's germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America's best-known postmodern novelist; his "New York Trilogy" must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it. This is bewildering, on its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all? Eighty per cent of a typical Auster novel proceeds in a manner indistinguishable from American realism; the remaining twenty per cent does a kind of postmodern surgery on the eighty per cent, often casting doubt on the veracity of the plot. Nashe, in "The Music of Chance" (1990), sounds as if he had sprung from a Raymond Carver story (although Carver would have written more interesting prose) ... 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." There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along. The reason Auster is not a realist writer, of course, is that his larger narrative games are anti-realist or surrealist.

Wood also bemoaned Auster's 'b-movie dialogue', 'absurdity', 'shallow skepticism', 'fake realism' and 'balsa-wood backstories'.

Auster with John Ashbery at the Brooklyn Book Festival

Personal life

Auster was married to the writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster, who was arrested and charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide in the death of his 10-month old infant daughter on April 16, 2022, who consumed * and fentanyl he was using. On April 26, 2022, Daniel, who was found to be in possession of drug paraphernalia, died from a overdose.

Auster and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scholar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster.

He has said his politics are "far to the left of the Democratic Party" but that he votes Democratic because he doubts a socialist candidate could win. He has 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."

Awards

1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère for The New York Trilogy
1990 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance
1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan
1996 Bodil Awards – Best American Film: Smoke
1996 Independent Spirit Award – Best First Screenplay: 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
2005 International Dublin Literary Award longlist for Oracle Night
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 "4321"

Published works

Fiction

Squeeze Play (1984) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)
The New York Trilogy (1987)
- City of Gl* (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)

Nonfiction

The Invention of Solitude (1982)
The Art of Hunger (1992)
The Red Notebook (1995) (The Red Notebook was originally printed in Granta (44)). (1993).
Hand to Mouth (1997)
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)
Winter Journal (2012)
Here and Now: Letters, 2008–2011 (2013) A collection of letters exchanged with J. M. Coetzee.
Report from the Interior (2013)
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)

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)

Poetry portal

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 *le 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)
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 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 Gl* was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.
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 uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.
Paul 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).
Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition ... ce qui arrive ... (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster with ensemble music and live electronics by Markus Noisternig and Thomas Musil (Ins*ute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM)). Paul Auster is heard 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 p*ed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones interact with those of a string ensemble. A film 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, en*led Sophie Auster, with the band One Ring Zero. The lyrics of three of the songs (in English) are by Paul Auster; and he also provided for the accompanying booklet translations of several French poems which form the lyrics of other songs on the album.
Paul Auster's voice may be heard on the 2005 album en*led We Must Be Losing It by The Farangs. The two tracks are en*led "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".
On the 2006 album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein.
In 2006 Paul 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 Russian film Плюс один (Plus One), the main character is in the process of translating one of Auster's books.
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 *les.
In the 2009 do*entary 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 do*entary on Charlotte Rampling The Look, Auster meditates on beauty with Charlotte Rampling on his moored tug boat on the Hudson river.
Pedro Almodovar's 2019 movie, "Pain and Glory" ("Dolor y Gloria"), is in many ways an homage to the works of Paul Auster. While Salvador is in his * induced stupor, Alberto logs on to his computer. As the camera pans across the desktop screen, we see an icon en*led "Paul Auster." The narrative structure and arc of the film, with its many coincidences (Federico stumbling on to the performance of the play; the discovery, many years later, of Eduardo's painting), are a visual depiction of an Auster novel.

Notes

References

External links

Media related to Paul Auster at Wikimedia Commons
Quotations related to Paul Auster at Wikiquote
Official website
'The Searcher', interview with The Guardian in May 1999
Michael Wood (Fall 2003). "Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178". The Paris Review. Fall 2003 (167).
'An Interview with Paul Auster', interview with 3:AM Magazine in November 2001
'Dem old Bush blues', interview with The Times in April 2004
'The Tyrannies and Epiphanies of Chance', 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', 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
I want to tell you a story piece by Auster at The Guardian, November 6, 2006. The sub*le 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
Paul Auster at IMDb
Paul Auster presents Winter journal in Barcelona and talks about Mexico, Turkey, Iran and Occupy Wall Street movement, very interesting, book channel C*-L
How I Became a Writer. An interview with Paul Auster, 2015 Video by Louisiana Channel
Bookworm Interviews (Audio) with Michael Silverblatt: January 1993, October 1999, December 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 & M*cript Library.
Christoph Amend, Jochen Wegner (February 11, 2021). "Paul Auster, Can You Tell Us the Story of America?". Alles Gesagt? (Podcast). Zeit Online. Retrieved February 22, 2021.

Paul Auster Is A Member Of

77 Year Olds

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