Description:

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.