Conversations with Paul Auster

James M. Hutchisson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781617037368
• eBook ISBN: 9781628468090
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. The steadily rising arc of his large readership has made him something of a popular culture figure with many appearances in print interviews, as well as on television, the radio, and the internet. Auster's best-known novel may be his first, City of Glass (1985), a grim and intellectually puzzling mystery that belies its surface image as a "detective novel" and goes on to become a profound meditation on transience and mortality, the inadequacies of language, and isolation. Fifteen more novels have followed since then, including The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions, and The Brooklyn Follies. He has, in the words of one critic, "given the phrase 'experimental fiction' a good name" by fashioning bona fide literary works with all the rigor and intellect demanded of the contemporary avant-garde. This volume—the first of its kind on Auster—will be useful to both scholars and students for the penetrating self-analysis and the wide range of biographical information and critical commentary it contains. Conversations with Paul Auster covers all of Auster's oeuvre, from The New York Trilogy —of which City of Glass is a component—to Sunset Park (2010), along with his screenplays for Smoke (1995) and Blue in the Face (1996). Within, Auster nimbly discusses his poetry, memoir, nonfiction, translations, and film directing.

Index

Adventures in Poetry (magazine), 205

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 135, 175

Altman, Robert, 54

Alvarez, Julia, xviii

American Notebooks (Hawthorne), xx, 9, 173–74

Ames, Jonathan, xix

Amis, Martin, 127

Amsterdam, 129

Applewhite, Ashton, xxn

Aragon, Louis, 72

Argo, Victor, 63, 115

Art and Literature (magazine), 205

Ashbery, John, 45

Auster, Anna (grandmother), xxi, 82

Auster, Daniel (son), xxii, 86, 89, 90

Auster, Harry (grandfather), xxi, 82

Auster, Paul

Anthologies

Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems, Translations, A, 205

Fiction

“Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story,” 50, 57, 58, 59, 61

Book of Illusions, The, xvi, xvii, xxiii, 127, 129, 130, 143, 145, 146, 147, 152, 156, 158, 164, 177, 179, 197

City of Glass, xi, xiv, xvii, xviii, xxii, 8, 9, 14, 20, 22, 25, 27–30, 31, 33, 87, 91, 102, 103, 125, 140. See also New York Trilogy

Ghosts, xi, xvii, 9, 10, 23, 33, 140, 144, 73, 193

In the Country of Last Things, xi, xiv, 11, 22, 34, 35, 76, 86, 91, 95, 101, 103, 141, 164, 165, 166

Invisible, 199, 201, 203–5, 207–11

Leviathan, 51, 52, 91, 95, 129, 141, 144, 164, 165

Locked Room, The, xi, xvii, 10, 17, 20, 27, 34, 100, 140, 174

Man in the Dark, xix, 193–95, 199, 201, 208

Moon Palace, xii, xiv, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20, 22, 34, 36–38, 4...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Works by Paul Auster
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Translation
• Interview with Paul Auster
• An Interview with Paul Auster
• Memory’s Escape—Inventing the Music of Chance: A Conversation with Paul Auster
• The Making of Smoke
• The Manuscript in the Book: A Conversation
• An Interview with Paul Auster
• The Futurist Radio Hour: An Interview with Paul Auster
• Paul Auster: Writer and Director
• Off the Page: Paul Auster
• Paul Auster: The Art of Fiction
• Jonathan Lethem Talks with Paul Auster
• A Conversation with Paul Auster
• The Making of The Inner Life of Martin Frost
• Interview: Paul Auster
• A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster
• Interview: Paul Auster on His New Novel, Invisible
• Index