Paul Auster

Life

• Paul Benjamin Auster
• Newark, New Jersey
• 1947
• Jewish family, Polish linage

Studies

• Columbia High School, Maplewood, New Jersey.
• Columbia University, NY.
• Graduated in 1970.

Early life

• 1970 - translator of French literature
• 1974 - back to the US and started writing

Family

• 1974 - Married Lydia Davis and had Daniel Auster
• 1981 - Married Siri Hustvedt and had Sophie Auster

Sophie Auster

INFLUENCED

• Psychoanalysis - world constructed through the language
• American trascendentalism - natural order of world
• Influenced by Poe and Beckett

“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.”

Subjects

• Coincidence
• Portrayal aesthetic life
• Imminent disaster
• Writer as protagonist or narrator
• Loss of ability to understand
• Loss of languaje
• Loss of money

Subjects

• Failure
• Absence of father
• Aetafiction
• Antertextuality
• American history
• American space

“All men contain several men inside them, and most of us bounce from one self to another without ever knowing who we are.”

"In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world."

Works

• 1987- New York Trilogy
• 1989 - Moon Palace
• 1990 - The Music of Chance
• 2002 - The Book of Illusions
• 2005 - The Brooklyn Follies

New York Trilogy

• City of Glass
• Ghosts
• The Locked Room

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“They had come to the end of what they could talk about. Beyond that point there was nothing: the random thoughts of men who knew nothing.”

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“But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next.”

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“Stories happen only to those who are able to tell them, someone once said. In the same way, perhaps, experiences present themselves only to those who are able to have them.”

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“When every card in the deck is stacked against you, the only way to win a hand is to break the rules.
You beg, borrow, and steal, as the old adage goes, and if you happen to get caught in the act, at least you´ve gone down fighting the good fight.”

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Screenplays

• 1993 - The Music of chance
• 1995 - Smoke
• 1995 - Blue in the Face
• 1998 - Lulu on the Bridge
• 2007 - The Inner Life of Martin Frost

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Awards

• 1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère for The New York Trilogy 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance 1996 Independent Spirit Award - Best First Screenplay: Smoke 2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

AWARDS

• 2004 IMPAC Award shortlist for The Book of Illusions 2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature 2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège 2007 IMPAC Award longlist for The Brooklyn Follies 2009 Premio Leteo (León, Spain). 2010 IMPAC Award longlist for Man in the Dark 2011 IMPAC Award longlist for Invisible 2012 NYC Literary Honors for fiction

"A good days work is if I have one typed page at the end of the day, two is amazing, three is a miracle.”

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“Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much.”