Paul Auster

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Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947, Newark, New Jersey) is a Brooklyn-based author. He is probably most famous for his collection of three loosely connected novels, The New York Trilogy.

He is also a translator, poet, editor, contributor, script writer and more recently film director.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Writing 3 Published works 3.1 Fiction 3.2 Poetry 3.3 Screenplays 3.4 Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies 3.5 Edited collections 3.6 Translations 3.7 Misc 4 Other media 5 See also 6 External links

Biography

Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents Samuel and Queenie Auster. He attended school in Maplewood, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to USA in 1974, he has published his own poems, essays, novels and translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He married his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, in 1981. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. He is the father of Daniel and Sophie.

He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

Writing

Auster's first novel was a detective novel called Squeeze Play (1976) and was written under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin (Benjamin is his middle name).

Auster gained renown for a series of three experimental detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy (1987). These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, creating his own distinctively postmodern form in the process. The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications.

Later Auster's works concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Leviathan). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes.

Not all criticism has been positive. B.R.Myers attacked Auster in "A Reader's Manifesto." In a review in the 11 October 2006 edition of the TLS, Deborah Friedell described Travels in the Scriptorium as "a slim homage to the novels of Paul Auster" [1].

He was awarded the 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, received in previous years by Günter Grass, Arthur Miller and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Published works

Fiction

• Squeeze play (1976)
• 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)
• Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1992)
• Mr. Vertigo (1994)
• Timbuktu (1999)
• The Book of Illusions (2002)
• Oracle Night (2004)
• The Brooklyn Follies (2005)
• Travels in the Scriptorium (UK 2006, USA 2007) (Denmark 2006)

Poetry

• Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988)
• Ground Work (1990)
• Selected Poems (1998)
• Collected Poems (2004)

Screenplays

• Smoke (1995)
• Blue in the Face (1995)
• Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
• The Center of the World (2001), (with Siri Hustvedt and Miranda July)
• The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2006)
• In the Country of Last things (2007)

Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies

• The Art of Hunger (1982)
• The Invention of Solitude (1982)
• The Red Notebook (1995)
• Why Write (1996)
• Hand to Mouth (1997)
• Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces, and Collaborations with Artists (2005) (includes The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth)

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 History Project) (2001)

Translations

• 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)
• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (2005)

Misc

• The Story of My Typewriter (2002)

Other media

On the 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 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released.

In 1994 City of Glass was adapted as a Graphic Novel by David Mazzucchelli (artist) and Paul Karasik.

Michael Mantler's album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.

Paul Auster's voice can 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 Paul Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost. It was shot in Lisbon in Portugal and starred his daughter Sophie Auster as the character Anna James.

The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song Penny In The Slot mention Auster and his book Timbuktu.

See also

Austria 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 (Institute 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 passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones can interact with these of a string ensemble. A film by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.

Paul is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster.

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