سیستمی مخوف و مقتدر، مردی را به جاسوسی و مراقبت از همسایه‌اش که مردی نویسنده و روشنفکر است می‌گمارد. مرد جاسوس به مقتضای شرایط جدیدش، رفته‌رفته تنها و خلوت‌گزین می‌شود. روزی درمی‌یابد که مرد همسایه نیز مامور مراقبت از اوست. سپس دچار این وهم می‌شود که مرد همسایه کسی نیست جز خود او. گویی انسان تنهایی است که مراقبت از خود را به عهده دارد و اگر دست از پا خطا کند به دست خود کشته خواهد شد.

Un hombre mayor está encerrado en una habitación. No recuerda quién es. Sobre el escritorio ve una pila de papeles cuya importancia no es capaz de descifrar. Ignora que le vigilan: lo que leemos es el informe de los movimientos de este amnésico al que llaman Mr. Blank y de las visitas que irá recibiendo. Una serie de personajes relacionados con su pasado pretenden ajustar cuentas con él. Otros le muestran su gratitud, como la mujer que le cuida, Anna (a quien está unido pese a haberle hecho algo terrible que no logra recordar). Cada visita proporcionará nuevas pistas sobre la identidad y el pasado de Mr. Blank.

¿Quién es realmente Mr. Blank? ¿Cuál es su relación con esos personajes que lo tienen encerrado? ¿De qué lo acusan? Uno de los manuscritos que hay entre los papeles del escritorio encierra la clave de su situación actual. La novela deviene entonces una mise en abyme donde resuenan ecos de las obras de Paul Auster.

«Todo empezó por un número equivocado, el teléfono sonó tres veces en mitad de la noche y la voz al otro lado preguntó por alguien que no era él.» Así comienza La ciudad de cristal , primera de las tres novelas que conforman La trilogía de Nueva York . A Daniel Quinn, escritor de literatura policíaca, su interlocutor telefónico lo toma por un detective y le encarga un caso. Quinn, lejos de deshacer el malentendido, se mete en el papel que le han adjudicado y se ve envuelto en una historia repleta de enigmas, complicadas relaciones paternofiliales, locura y delirio. En Fantasmas , segunda de las piezas, un detective privado y el hombre al que tiene que vigilar juegan al escondite en un claustrofóbico universo urbano. Por último, en La habitación cerrada el protagonista se ve confrontado a los recuerdos de un amigo de la infancia cuando la mujer de éste le escribe una carta explicándole que su marido ha desaparecido misteriosamente.
La trilogía de Nueva York , una de las obras literarias más memorables de los años ochenta, es uno de los cimientos sobre los que se sustenta el prestigio internacional de Paul Auster. El escritor maneja, manipula y reinventa el género policíaco, del que hace una relectura posmoderna con tintes metafísicos. La trama detectivesca sirve como marco para plantear al lector un fascinante juego de espejos, símbolos, guiños y sorpresas; para explorar un mundo extraño, sombrío y perturbador, poblado de personajes fascinantes y ambiguos. El autor entreteje tres historias independientes que forjan mitos contemporáneos.

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 puzzling 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 close 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.

Against the mythical dreamscape of America, Auster brilliantly weaves the bizarre narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan searching for love, his father, and the key to the riddle of his origin and fate.

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.

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationary 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. A novel that expands to fill volumes in the reader's mind, Oracle Night is a beautifully constructed meditation on time, love, storytelling and the imagination by one of America's boldest and most original writers.

Paul Auster’s most intimate autobiographical work to date
In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . .
Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior.
From his baby’s-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Report from the Interior charts Auster’s moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s.
Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life—and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: The final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures. At once a story of the times—which makes it everyone’s story—and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.

孤兒華特遇見一位自稱『葉胡迪大師』的神秘人物，不但將他救離了聖路易市的街頭，更教他不用藉助任何外力便能『凌空漫步』的神技！從此以後，會飛行的『神奇男孩華特』風靡了全國！然而對華特來說，一趟真正的人生大歷險才正要展開……故事背景的美國一九二○年代末期，正是全壘打王貝比•魯斯、偉大飛行家林白及黑社會老大艾爾•卡邦名揚天下的時代，也是三K黨橫行、社會紊亂、經濟浮動的年代。華特的成名與致富，真實地反映出美國當時的社會情況。而從少年的意氣風發到老年回歸平靜，華特的乖舛命運也和這個國家一樣，一再面臨挑戰。作者在書中再次展現高明的說故事技巧，筆調輕鬆迷人，情節更是耐人尋味。

IN THE BEGINNING, EVERYTHING WAS ALIVE. THE SMALLEST OBJECTS WERE ENDOWED WITH BEATING HEARTS, AND EVEN THE CLOUDS HAD NAMES.
Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world.
In Report from the Interior, from his baby’s-eye view of the man in the moon to his dawning awareness of the injustices in American life, Auster charts his intellectual, political, and moral journey as he inches his way toward adulthood from the postwar fifties and into the turbulent sixties. He then recapitulates that journey through an album of pictures, answering the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.

"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."

Six months after losing his wife and two young sons, Vermont Professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann. His 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 back in 1929.

When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer’s mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico inviting him to meet Hector. Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.

A mystery writer assumes a detective's identity and embarks on a bizzare case: he must protect a man from his criminally insane father, and as he follows the elusive criminal, he embarks on a mission that takes him to the depths of his own soul. Auster's In the Country of Last Things is being published this month by Viking.

An immensely moving poetic work addressing inconsolable sorrow: a father's pain over the death of his child. Bilingual. "One of the most moving accounts of a man trying to come to grips with modern death—that is to say, death without God, death without hope of salvation—and it reveals the secret meaning of Mallarmé's whole aesthetic: the elevation of art to the stature of religion." —Paul Auster, from the Introduction The great French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who changed the course of modern French literature (and influenced writers from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot to Wallace Stevens), suffered many tragedies. His mother died when he was just five years old, but in 1879 the cruelest blow of all struck when his beloved son Anatole died at the age of eight. A Tomb for Anatole presents the 202 fragments of Mallarmé's projected long poem in four parts. By far the poet's most personal work, he could never bring himself to complete it. To speak publicly of his immense sorrow, Mallarmé concluded, "for me, it's not possible." Unpublished in France until 1961, these works are very far from the oblique, cool "pure poetry" Mallarmé is famous for, poetry that sought to capture—painstakingly—" l'absente de tous bouquets " (the ideal flower absent from all bouquets). Paul Auster, who first published A Tomb for Anatole with the North Point Press in 1983 (a volume long out of print), notes in his excellent introduction that facing "the ultimate horror of every parent," these fragments "have a startling unmediated quality." As Mallarmé writes, it is "a vision / endlessly purified / by my tears."

Beginning with a short philosophical meditation written when he was twenty and concluding with nine political pieces that take on such issues as homelessness, 9/11, and the link between soccer and war, the 44 pieces gathered in this volume offer a wide-ranging view of celebrated novelist Paul Auster’s thoughts on a multitude of classic and contemporary writers, the high-wire exploits of Philippe Petit, how to improve life in New York City (in collaboration with visual artist Sophie Calle), and the long road he has traveled with his beloved manual typewriter.
While writing for the New York Review of Books and other publications in the mid-1970s, young poet Auster gained recognition as an astute literary critic with essays on Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, and others. By the late seventies and early eighties, as the poet was transforming himself into a novelist, he maintained an active double life by continuing his work as a translator and editing the groundbreaking anthology, The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry. His prefaces to some of these books are included in Talking to Strangers, among them a heart-wrenching account of Stéphane Mallarmé’s response to the death of his eight-year-old son, Anatole.
In recent years, Auster has pushed on with explorations into the work of American artists spanning various periods and disciplines: the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the films of Jim Jarmusch, the writings of painter-collagist-illustrator Joe Brainard, and the three-hit shutout thrown by journeyman right-hander Terry Leach of the Mets. Also included here are several rediscovered works that were originally delivered in public: a 1982 lecture on Edgar Allan Poe, a 1999 blast against New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and one of the funniest introductions a poetry reading ever heard in the state of New Jersey.
A collection of soaring intelligence and deepest humanity, Talking to Strangers is an essential book by “the most distinguished American writer of [his] generation . . . indeed its only author . . . with any claim to greatness.” (The Spectator)