Paul Auster books

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Paul Auster (1947-2024) was an American novelist who lived most of his adult life in Brooklyn. His fiction blends detective story structures with philosophical questions about identity, chance, and the nature of language. He was more widely read in Europe than in the United States, and his books have been translated into more than 40 languages.

Auster’s breakthrough came with the New York Trilogy (1985-1986), three novellas that took the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction and turned them inside out. City of Glass follows a writer who assumes a detective’s identity; Ghosts strips the genre to pure allegory; The Locked Room collapses the boundary between author and subject. These books established the themes Auster returned to throughout his career. His later novels include Moon Palace (1989), The Book of Illusions (2002), and 4 3 2 1 (2017), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His final novel, Baumgartner, was published in 2023. He also wrote extensively about his own life in works like The Invention of Solitude (1985) and Winter Journal (2012), and published a major biography, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Auster died of lung cancer on April 30, 2024.