Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | White Spaces | 1980 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 2 | The Art of Hunger | 1983 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 3 | The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert | 1983 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 4 | The Invention of Solitude | 1985 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 5 | The Red Notebook | 1993 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 6 | Why Write? | 1996 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 7 | Translations | 1997 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 8 | Paul Auster’s New York | 1997 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 9 | Hand to Mouth | 1997 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 10 | The Story of My Typewriter | 2002 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 11 | Collected Prose | 2003 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 12 | Winter Journal | 2012 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 13 | Here and Now | 2012 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 14 | Report from the Interior | 2013 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 15 | A Life in Words | 2017 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 16 | Talking to Strangers | 2019 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 17 | Groundwork | 2020 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 18 | Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane | 2021 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 19 | Long Live King Kobe | 2022 | Paul Auster | Buy |
| 20 | Bloodbath Nation | 2023 | Paul Auster | Buy |
Paul Auster’s non-fiction is a large and varied body of work, spanning essays, memoirs, correspondence, translations, and biography. He wrote about his own life with the same attention to coincidence and pattern that defines his fiction, and his autobiographical works are often read alongside his novels.
The Invention of Solitude (1985), written after his father’s death, is a two-part meditation on memory and fatherhood that established many of his lifelong themes. Hand to Mouth (1997) recounts his years of poverty as a young writer in New York. Winter Journal (2012) and Report from the Interior (2013) return to autobiography, cataloging his physical experiences and inner life respectively. Here and Now (2012) collects his correspondence with the novelist J. M. Coetzee. His final major non-fiction work, Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021), is a biography of the author of The Red Badge of Courage and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Bloodbath Nation (2023), his last published work of non-fiction, addresses gun violence in America.