Paul Auster

Drei Jahre lang hat Walt, der Wunderknabe, mit Meister Yehudi trainiert, dann hat er den Bogen raus, hebt ab und fliegt seine Schleifen über den Köpfen des staunenden Jahrmarktspublikums von Kansas. Aber weil er anno 1927 erst zwölf ist, steigt und fällt er noch oft: als Gangster in Chicago, Barbesitzer und Waschsalonmanager, erlebt Börsenkrach, Prohibition, Mafia und Ku-Klux-Klan. Paul Austers achter Roman ist ein schelmischer Luftritt, eine Märchenreise, aber auch ein Rückblick auf dieses gewalttätige Jahrhundert.

Der Film "Smoke" erzählt die Geschichte mehrerer völlig unterschiedlicher Menschen, deren Lebenswege sich auf seltsame Weise in einem Brooklyner Zigarrenladen kreuzen. "Blue in the Face" ist eine hinreißende, skurrile Liebeserklärung an Brooklyn, jenen Stadtteil New Yorks, in dem nichts so läuft, wie man es erwartet. Die Drehbücher zu beiden Filmen schrieb Paul Auster; Wayne Wang führte Regie. Neben den Hauptdarstellern Harvey Keizel und William Hurt spielen u. a. Lou Reed, Jim Jarmusch, Roseanne, Michael J. Fox und Madonna mit. "Smoke" wurde auf der Berlinale 1995 mit dem Silbernen Bären ausgezeichnet.

Paul Auster's dazzling, picaresque novel is the story of one Walter Claireborne Rawley, renowned nationwide as "Walt the Wonder Boy." It is the late 1920's, the era of Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Al Capone, and Walt is a Saint Louis orphan rescued frm the streets by the mysterious Hungarian Master Yehudi, who teaches Walt to walk on air. The vaudeville act that results from Walt's marvelous new abiltiy takes them across a vast and vibrant country, where they meet and fall prey to sinners, thieves, and villains, from the Kansas Ku Klux Klan to the Chicago mob. Walt's rise to fame and fortune mirrors America's own coming of age, and his resilience, like that of the nation, is challenged over and over again. Mr. Vertigo is a bravura celebration of a raucous age, an ambitious and enduringly brilliant tale of trial and triumph.

"? Die Erfindung der Einsamkeit? ist ... ein überraschend leicht lesbares Buch von existentieller Wucht und beispielloser Wahrhaftigkeit ... Paul Auster, dessen Vorfahren aus Österreich kamen, erinnert an einen Robert Musil, der Hammett und Chandler gelesen hat." (Klaus Modick, Süddeutsche Zeitung)

So begins the story told by Peter Aaron and his best friend, Benjamin Sachs. Sachs had a marriage Aaron envied, an intelligence he admired, a world he shared. and then suddenly, after a near-fatal fall that might or night not have been intentional, Sachs disappeared. Now Aaron must piece together the life that led to Sach's death. His sole aim is to tell the truth and preserve it, before those who are investigating the case invent an account of their own. Paul Auster's extraordinary seventh novel is about friendship and betrayal, sexual desire and estrangement, and the unpredictable instrusions of violence in the everyday. It is a daring and immensely moving story by an author whom The Times Literary Supplement has called "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers."

In this volume, Paul Auster has selected prose poems and lyrics from five volumes of Dupin’s poetry published over a quarter-century. Sharing affinities and landscapes with Reverdy, Char, and Ponge, Dupin has developed, nevertheless, a poetry so distinctive and innovative to the American ear and eye that it could, especially with this selection, tincture the reading and writing of poetry in the United States. Eschewing theory, he creates speculations that enact the self’s effacement, while sustaining the human in brilliant imagery and shadowy narrative. In her introduction to these poems, Mary Ann Caws writes, “Nothing is permitted a reach higher than the human. The very precariousness of living informs this deeply moving poetics, quiet and always at risk.”

" ... Austers Bücher wirken überraschend zeitgemäß, weil sie auf eine Erfahrung des Lebens - jetzt in diesem Augenblick - aus sind und mit einer monomanischen Lust vordringen in einen sonst sorgsam gehüteten Bereich: in unsere eigene Verwirrtheit angesichts der Welt ... In dem Roman 'Im Land der letzten Dinge' sind alle Spuren einer vertrauten Wirklichkeit scheinbar getilgt ... Allerdings spielt Paul Auster hier nur mit Science-fiction-Versatzstücken, denn in seinen Augen bedarf es nur einer kleinen Drehung an der Schraube unserer Zivilisation, um sie in die Apokalypse, in ein neues (altes) Barbarentum umkippen zu lassen." (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster "Exhilarating . . . a brilliant investigation of the storyteller's art guided by a writer-detective who's never satisfied with just the facts."--The Philadelphia Inquirer City of Glass: As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Ghosts: Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his own window. The Locked Room: Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened to him and why is the narrator, Fanshawe's boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life? Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this is a uniquely stylized trilogy of detective novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existential private eye. . . . It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version."