What To Read

Paul Auster is most well-known for his experimental metafiction featuring unreliable narrators and blurred lines between reality and the imaginary, without sacrificing emotional complexity. While his legacy for postmodern metafiction will live on, the prolific author has covered expansive territory over the past few decades when it comes to writing style and subject matter. His new book, Baumgartner, coming out on Tuesday, is being praised as "a late-career triumph." It's a great time to discover—or rediscover—the world of Paul Auster with this list of 8 favorites recommended by a Tertulia staff member and super fan.

Baumgartner

Superfans of Paul Auster — myself included — can't wait for his first novel since 4 3 2 1. Baumgartner comes out this week on Tuesday, November 7.

The book concerns Sy Baumgartner, an aging author and university professor who is still dealing with his wife's untimely death nine years earlier. As the novel cycles through the memories of their relationship as well as Baumgartner's upbringing and his father's life, Auster spins a compassionate tale of life, loss, and beauty. Early reviews report that the book is a departure from his earlier work which have come to be hallmarks of postmodern lit. But some readers say that the book has promise to be one of his best yet.

"By dispensing with his postmodern pyrotechnics, Auster has produced a more grounded and consequently more believable work about a memorable life — and a life of memories. It may not be vintage Auster, but it is moving and compelling enough to qualify as a late-career triumph." —Los Angeles Times

The New York Trilogy

Auster first gained wide recognition for this now-classic triology of novels published in 1987.

It was the first book that introduced me to Auster, and I'll never forget the exhilarating ride through his "existential gumshoe shenanigans" as The Guardian called them. Over the course of three interconnected and experimental detective novellas, Auster crafts a richly layered noir world of intrigue and backstabbing. This is the rare page turner that is as philosophically provocative as it is entertaining.

Moon Palace

Moon Palace is an entertaining and accessible adventure novel - and a great starting point for readers new to Auster.

In this American twist on the picaresque novel, an orphan goes on a quest for answers about his past and his fate. The book, set both in gritty Manhattan and the majestic Southwest, spans generations, cycling backwards and forwards through time. Though I read it ages ago, I can vividly picture in my imagination the charismatic Marco Stanley Fogg and a few others in the colorful cast of characters in this book.

"This witty and wildly inventive novel revels in its implausibilities, and it does so with an attention to character and cosmos worthy of Swift, Fielding, or Sterne." —Kirkus Reviews

4 3 2 1

4 3 2 1, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, is one of Auster's most ambitious novels — at a sprawling and immersive 880 pages.

The book follows Archibald Isaac Ferguson as he lives through four wildly different fictional lives that play out simultaneously. Auster beautifully illustrates the various possibilities that spring up for the character, which depend on the particular suburb in New Jersey where each Ferguson is raised.

"It's a stunningly ambitious novel, and a pleasure to read. Auster's writing is joyful, even in the book's darkest moments, and never ponderous or showy." —NPR

Bloodbath Nation

This timely rumination on American gun violence was a collaboration with photographer Spencer Ostrander.

Though not quite as celebrated as his fiction, Auster's nonfiction output is every bit as piercing and intimate. This book, released earlier this year, is a testament to his remarkable ability to work in different forms. Bloodbath Nation traces the development of gun violence in the United States and the bitter debates on the topic that rage on across the country.

"The power of Auster’s book is that it never blinks in articulating this dilemma, that it doesn’t let anybody off the hook. Gun violence in the United States is a collective problem, after all—which also means, as Bloodbath Nation argues so compellingly, that it is a collective responsibility." —4Columns

The Invention of Solitude

Auster's debut book is a masterpiece of memoir, which moved him into the literary spotlight before any of his acclaimed fiction was even published.

This book delves into the dark period of his life after the sudden death of his father, and the mystery that emerges from the death. But this book is every bit as experimental and playful as his other works. The book is split into two sections: first, Auster first reflects on his memories with his father, and then he adopts a separate narrative persona reflecting on Auster's own identity as a father. I loved how Auster wove in themes of coincidence and absurdism into the book, along with what M.S. Merwin called in The New York Times "moving, delicately perceived portraits of lives and relationship.”

The Book of Illusions

Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, The Book of Illusions is an example of Auster's trademark metanarrative mixed with high noir drama.

In it, David Zimmer, a university professor dealing with the recent death of his wife and two sons in a plane crash, begins to obsess over Hector Mann, a mysterious silent comedian who has been missing for years, and he eventually publishes a book about Mann. When Zimmer is invited to Mann's New Mexico home, an unforeseen string of events sets off that will change both of their lives forever. Auster uses metafictional and absurdist elements to document one man's rehabilitation from grief.

"It is a detective story with catastrophe at its heels, the salvation of self as its object and, at its emotional heart, loss and deep silence. We are unmistakably in Paul Auster's world of doubles, parallels, mazes, massed shadows, masks, of deaths within deaths, stories within stories, like a Chinese box of revelations." —The Guardian

Sunset Park

Finally, I can't resist the Brooklyn setting of an author who has lived and breathed the borough for so much of his life.

Set during the 2008 financial recession, this novel follows college dropout Miles Heller returning to his hometown of NYC and reuniting with a friend who lives with a community of squatters in an abandoned house. Weaving together various points of view including Miles' parents, an independent book publisher and an actor, Auster constructs a story of warmth, reconnection, and self-discovery.