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The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of
America's most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is
three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of
standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the
more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective
fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound
and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or
Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable
coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man
ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be
human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a
truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix
and astound every reader. 'Marks a new departure for the American
novel.' Observer 'A shatteringly clever piece of work . . . Utterly
gripping, written with an acid sharpness that leaves an indelible
dent in the back of the mind.' Sunday Telegraph 'The New York
Trilogy established him as the only author one could compare to
Samuel Beckett.' Guardian
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Timbuktu (Paperback)
Paul Auster
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R395
R365
Discovery Miles 3 650
Save R30 (8%)
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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Mr. Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's astonishing book, is
the sidekick and confidant of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant and
troubled homeless man from Brooklyn. As Willy's body slowly
expires, he sets off with Mr. Bones for Baltimore in search of his
high-school English teacher and a new home for his companion. Mr.
Bones is our witness during their journey, and out of his thoughts
Paul Auster has spun one of the richest, most compelling tales in
recent American fiction.
Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, retired,
estranged from his only daughter, the former life insurance
salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Glass encounters
his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, who is working in a local
bookstore. Through Tom and his charismatic boss, Harry, Nathan's
world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances,
which leads him to a reckoning with his past.
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 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 the great
writers of our time" ("San Francisco Chronicle").
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4 3 2 1 (Paperback)
Paul Auster
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R587
R551
Discovery Miles 5 510
Save R36 (6%)
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Ships in 18 - 22 working days
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Baumgartner (Main)
Paul Auster
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R637
R541
Discovery Miles 5 410
Save R96 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Baumgartner's life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for
his wife, Anna. But now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking
on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. Rich with
compassion, wit and Auster's keen eye for beauty in the smallest,
most transient episodes of ordinary life, Baumgartner is a tender
late masterpiece of the ache of memory. It asks: why do we find
such meaning in certain moments, and forget others?
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Hunger (Paperback, Main - Canons Imprint Re-Issue)
Knut Hamsun; Introduction by Jo Nesbo; Afterword by Paul Auster; Translated by Sverre Lyngstad; Introduction by Paul Auster
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R287
R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
Save R27 (9%)
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Ships in 9 - 17 working days
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INTRODUCTION BY JO NESBO AFTERWORD BY PAUL AUSTER
Nineteenth-century Kristiania is an unforgiving place, and work is
thin on the ground. Roaming the streets of Norway's capital, a
penniless young writer searches for inspiration whilst trying
desperately to make ends meet. Driven to extraordinary lengths,
sleeping under the stars with his stomach growling, the writer's
behaviour becomes increasingly irrational and his world spirals
into chaos. Hunger was Knut Hamsun's first novel and earned him the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920. A disturbing and darkly
humorous masterpiece of existential fiction, Hunger anticipated and
influenced some of the twentieth century's most acclaimed writers
including Camus, Kafka and Fante.
'I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended
Brooklyn, and so the next morning I travelled down there from
Westchester to scope out the terrain . . .' So begins Paul Auster's
remarkable new novel, The Brooklyn Follies. Set against the
backdrop of the contested US election of 2000, it tells the story
of Nathan and Tom, an uncle and nephew double-act. One in remission
from lung cancer, divorced, and estranged from his only daughter,
the other hiding away from his once-promising academic career, and,
indeed, from life in general. Having accidentally ended up in the
same Brooklyn neighbourhood, they discover a community teeming with
life and passion. When Lucy, a little girl who refuses to speak,
comes into their lives, there is suddenly a bridge from their pasts
that offers them the possibility of redemption. Infused with
character, mystery and humour, these lives intertwine and become
bound together as Auster brilliantly explores the wider terrain of
contemporary America - a crucible of broken dreams and of human
folly. 'Auster at the top of his game. This superb novel about
human folly turns out to be tremendously wise.' New Statesman
Meet Mr Bones, the canine hero of Paul Auster's remarkable novel.
Bones is the sidekick of Willy G. Christmas, a brilliant but
troubled poet-saint from Brooklyn. Together they sally forth across
America to Baltimore, Maryland, on one last great adventure,
searching for Willy's old teacher, Bea Swanson. Years have passed
since Willy last saw his beloved mentor, who used to know him as
William Gurevitch, son of Polish war refugees. But is Mrs Swanson
still alive? And if not, what will prevent Willy from vanishing
into that other world known as Timbuktu? 'In this brilliant novel,
Auster writes with economy, precision and the quirky pathos of
noir, addressing the pernicious ubiquity of American consumerism,
the nature of love and the core riddles of ontology. Above all,
though, this is the affecting tale of a special dog's place in the
universe of humans and in the fleeting life of a special man.'
Publishers Weekly
'It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very
young back then, but did not believe there would ever be a future.
I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go,
and then see what happened when I got there.' So begins the
mesmerising narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the
1960s, a quester by nature. Moon Palace is his story - a novel that
spans three generations, from the early years of this century to
the first lunar landings, and moves from the canyons of Manhattan
to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled
with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies and
marvellous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the
reader effortlessly along with Marco's search - for love, for his
unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his
origins and his fate. 'Clever: very. Surprising: always - Auster is
a master.' The Times
A career retrospective of poetry and prose works by one of the
under-recognized giants of French literature Andre du Bouchet, a
great innovator of twentieth-century letters, has yet to be fully
recognized by a wide circle of international readers. This inviting
volume sets out to remedy the oversight, introducing a selection of
du Bouchet's poetry and prose to English-language readers through
the brilliant translations of Paul Auster and Hoyt Rogers. Openwork
showcases pieces from the author's entire trajectory, beginning
with little-known pieces from the 1950s, followed by major poems
from the 1960s, and concluding with works written or rewritten in
the poet's later decades. Throughout his life, du Bouchet devoted
himself to long walks in his beloved French countryside, jotting
down entries in notebooks as he rambled. These notebooks-more than
one hundred all together-have emerged as signal works in their own
right, and their musings are well represented in this anthology.
The Book of Illusions, written with breath-taking urgency and
precision, plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic
and the tragic, the real and the imagined, and the violent and the
tender dissolve into one another. One man's obsession with the
mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a
shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing
his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David
Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching
television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent
comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . . Mann was a
comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black
moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and
was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him
to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter
postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and
inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be
alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his
doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.
'A nearly flawless work . . . Auster will be remembered as one of
the great writers of our time.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Auster's
elegant, finely calibrated The Book of Illusions is a haunting feat
of intellectual gamesmanship.' TheNew York Times
** WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY **
'Exhilarating.' Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement Books
of the Year 'Sharp-eyed and revealing.' The New Yorker 'Brilliant .
. . Remarkable.' New York Journal of Books Stephen Crane produced
an avalanche of sublime literature before he succumbed to
tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. Yet his short life was an
eventful one: from crushing poverty as a newcomer to Manhattan and
his near-drowning in a shipwreck, to his stint as a war
correspondent in Cuba and international fame at twenty-five, to his
final years in England and friendships with Joseph Conrad and Henry
James. In Burning Boy, celebrated novelist Paul Auster delves
deeply into the story of Crane's tumultuous and dramatic life.
On March 3rd, 1947, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the only child of
Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning,
Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous paths. Four Fergusons
will go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives.
Family fortunes diverge. Loves and friendships and passions
contrast. Each version of Ferguson's story rushes across the
fractured terrain of mid-twentieth century America, in this
sweeping story of birthright and possibility, of love and the
fullness of life itself.
Joe Brainard's I Remember is a cult classic, envied and admired by
writers from Frank O'Hara to John Ashbery and Edmund White. As
autobiography, Brainard's method was brilliantly simple: to set
down specific memories as they rose to the surface of his
consciousness, each prefaced by the refrain 'I remember'. Fifty-two
years after its original US publication in 1970, this is the first
UK edition. 'In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he
charts the map of the human soul and permanently alters the way we
look at the world. I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply
moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have
ever read.' Paul Auster 'I would make a case for I Remember as one
of the twenty or so most important American autobiographies,
important for its air of unimportance and for its mingling of
cultural bric-a-brac with sexual frankness and self-revelation.'
New Yorker
'You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to
you, that you are the only person world to whom none of these
things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to
happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.' In
Winter Journal, Paul Auster moves through the events of his life in
a series of memories grasped from the point of view of his life
now: playing baseball as a teenager; participating in the
anti-Vietnam demonstrations at Columbia University; seeking out
prostitutes in Paris, almost killing his second wife and child in a
car accident; falling in and out of live with his first wife; the
'scalding, epiphanic moment of clarity' in 1978 that set him on a
new course as a writer. Winter Journal is a poignant memoir of
ageing and memory, written with all the characteristic subtlety,
imagination and insight that readers of Paul Auster have come to
cherish. 'An examination of the emotions of a man growing old . . .
this book has much to recommend it, and Auster is unsparingly
honest about himself.' Financial Times
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017On March 3rd, 1947,
Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the only child of Rose and Stanley
Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will
take four simultaneous paths. Four Fergusons will go on to lead
four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes
diverge. Loves and friendships and passions contrast. Each version
of Ferguson's story rushes across the fractured terrain of
mid-twentieth century America, in this sweeping story of birthright
and possibility, of love and the fullness of life itself.
'That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know
the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no
sense . . .' This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to
find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City
itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is
left is Anna's unwritten account of what happened. Paul Auster
takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self
disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not
just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka
stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses
some of our darker legacies. In the Country of Last Things is a
tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel. It continues
Auster's deep exploration of his central themes: the modern city,
the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature
of truth.
Paul Auster's Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of
Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the
last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses
due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having
inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation
that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York
seven years ago. What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with
a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to
expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going
back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to
face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation
he has been avoiding for years. Set against the backdrop of the
devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of
Auster's previous novel Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it
is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature.
It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only
among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.
'I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water . . .' So
begins Mr Vertigo, the story of Walt, an irrepressible orphan from
the Mid-West. Under the tutelage of the mesmerising Master Yehudi,
Walt is taken back to the mysterious house on the plains to prepare
not only for the ability to fly, but also for the stardom that will
accompany it. At the same time a delighted race through 1920s
Americana and a richly allusive parable, Mr Vertigo is a
compelling, magical novel - a work of true originality by a writer
at the height of his powers. 'A virtuoso piece of storytelling by a
master of the modern American fable.' The Independent
'By the time Nashe understood what was happening to him, he was
past the point of wanting it to end . . .' Paul Auster fuses Samuel
Beckett, Franz Kafka and The Brothers Grimm in this brilliant and
unsettling parable. Following the death of his father, Jim Nashe
takes to the open road in pursuit of a 'life of freedom'. But as
the money runs out he finds that his sense of disillusionment has
only been compounded by his year on the road. However, after
picking up Pozzi, a hitchhiking gambler, Nashe finds himself drawn
into a dangerous game of high-stakes poker with two eccentric and
reclusive millionaires. 'A rare experience of contemporary fiction
at its most thrilling.' New Statesman
Here and Now is a collection of letters between Paul Auster and
Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, two of the greatest writers of our
time. 'Uniquely insightful.' Independent 'Extraordinary.' Times
Literary Supplement Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been
reading each other's books for years, the two writers did not meet
until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from
Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular
basis and, 'God willing, strike sparks off each other'. Here and
Now is the result of that proposal: an epistolary dialogue between
two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their
letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood,
literature to film, philosophy to politics, from the financial
crisis to art, eroticism, marriage, friendship, and love.
Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Invisible 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
girlfriend 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, as it travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves
from New York to Paris and to a remote Caribbean island in a story
of unbridled sexual hunger and a relentless quest for justice. With
uncompromising insight, Auster takes us to the shadowy borderland
between truth and memory, authorship and identity to produce a work
of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as one of
America's most spectacularly inventive writers.
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Fractal Noise
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