The New York Trilogy (Book)

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    Paul Auster’s Best Books: A Guide

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    The novelist played with reality and chance in tales of solitary narrators and mutable identities. Here’s an overview of his work.Paul Auster, who died on April 30 at the age of 77, was an atmospheric author whose scalpel-sharp prose examined the fluidity of identity and the absurdity of the writer’s life. An occasional memoirist, essayist, translator, poet and screenwriter, Auster was best known for his metafiction — books that were characterized by their elusive narrators, chance encounters and labyrinthine narratives.Consuming Auster’s genre-defying books is not unlike the experience of reading he describes in “The Brooklyn Follies”: “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear,” he wrote. “For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.” Thankfully, Auster left us with many worlds and stories and realities to lose ourselves in.These are the books that best represent his work.The Invention of Solitude (1982)Auster’s debut memoir, “The Invention of Solitude,” put him on the map as an exciting new voice in the literary world. Bold and inventive, it chronicles his life as the son of an absent father and the father of a young son. The book’s themes — grief, loss, identity, loneliness, coincidence — all became central in his later work, both fiction and nonfiction.The New York Trilogy (1987)This book is technically a triptych of novels (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room”), each of which borrows elements from detective fiction by focusing on a man investigating a subject to the point of oblivion. But at its core, “The New York Trilogy” — likely his most popular work among academics, undergraduates and aspiring writers — is a meditation on the things that make a person who they are. It cemented Auster as a stylish writer, one whose distinctive narrators searched for meaning and identity, circuitously and in perpetuity, against the constraints of art and language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul Auster, Prolific Author and Brooklyn Literary Star, Dies at 77

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      With critically lauded works like “The New York Trilogy,” the charismatic author and patron saint of his adopted borough drew worldwide acclaim.Paul Auster, the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77.His death was confirmed by a friend, Jacki Lyden.With his hooded eyes, soulful air and leading-man looks, Mr. Auster was often described as a “literary superstar” in news accounts. The Times Literary Supplement of Britain once called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”Though a New Jersey native, he became indelibly linked with the rhythms of his adopted city, which was a character of sorts in much of his work — particularly Brooklyn, where he settled in 1980 amid the oak-lined streets of brownstones in the Park Slope neighborhood.As his reputation grew, Mr. Auster came to be seen as a guardian of Brooklyn’s rich literary past, as well as an inspiration to a new generation of novelists who flocked to the borough in the 1990s and later.“Paul Auster was the Brooklyn novelist back in the ’80s and ’90s, when I was growing up there, at a time when very few famous writers lived in the borough,” the author and poet Meghan O’Rourke, who was raised in nearby Prospect Heights, wrote in an email. “His books were on all my parents’ friends’ shelves. As teenagers, my friends and I read Auster’s work avidly for both its strangeness — that touch of European surrealism — and its closeness.“Long before ‘Brooklyn’ became a place where every novelist seemed to live, from Colson Whitehead to Jhumpa Lahiri,” she added, “Auster made being a writer seem like something real, something a person actually did.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More