After losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he sees a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929.
Presumed dead for sixty years, Hector Mann was a comic genius who had flashed briefly across American movie screens, tantalizing the public with the promise of a brilliant future. Then, just as the silent era came to an end, he walked out of his house one January morning and was never heard from again.
Zimmer's research leads him to write the first full-length study of Hector's films. Upon publication the following year, a letter turns up bearing a return address from New Mexico -- supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision from him, changing his life forever.

The Book of Illusions

Literature & Fiction

AUSTER, PAUL.

Literary

HarperAudio

Oracle Night

One of America's foremost writers collects the best stories submitted to NPR's National Story Project -- and illuminates the powerful role of storytelling in all our lives.
When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives.
And so the National Story Project was born. It was one of NPR's most popular features. The response was so overwhelming, with more than 4,000 stories submitted that Auster decided to cull the top works and make them available in a book -- and now this CD collection. His selections -- hilarious blunders, wrenching coincidences, brushes with death, miraculous encounters, improbable ironies -- come from people of all ages and walks of life.
This one-of-a-kind collection is a testament to the power of storytelling that offers a glimpse into the American soul. By turns poignant, nostalgic, funny, and strange, it is an audiobook to be treasured and shared for years to come.

I Thought My Father Was God

Dramas & Plays

From the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel – a spare, powerful, intensely visionary novel about the bare-bones conditions of survival In a distant and unsettling future, Anna Blume is on a mission in an unnamed city of chaos and disaster. Its destitute inhabitants scavenge garbage for food and shelter, no industry exists, and an elusive government provides nothing but corruption. Anna wades through the filth to find her long-lost brother, a one-time journalist who may or may not be alive.New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy) shows us a disturbing Hobbesian society in this dystopian, post-apocalyptic novel.

In the Country of Last Things

United States

Penguin Publishing Group

From Paul Auster, author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A novel – his debut work of fiction, the first volume in his acclaimed “New York Trilogy” series of novels Nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Mystery of the Year, City of Glass inaugurates the intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that the Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye...It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective fiction and crime books, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense to City of Glass.

City of Glass (New York Trilogy, 1)

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

Penguin??Books

White hires Blue, a New York City private detective, to keep an eye on Black, but eventually Blue finds his own life in danger

Ghosts (New York Trilogy)

When Fanshawe disappears, his wife, Sophie, contacts the narrator in hopes that he, one of Fanshawe's childhood friends, can solve the mystery

The Locked Room (New York Trilogy)

Contemporary

Penguin Group USA

"One day there is life . . . and then, suddenly, it happens there is death". So begins THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood. After the death of his own father, Auster discovers a 60-year-old family murder mystery that could account for the old man's elusive character. Later the book shifts from Auster's identity as son to his own role as father.

The Invention of Solitude

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Penguin

Moon Palace

The “beautiful and haunting” (San Francisco Chronicle) tale of an orphan’s search for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his fate, from the author of the forthcoming 4 3 2 1: A Novel Marco Stanley Fogg is an orphan, a child of the sixties, a quester tirelessly seeking the key to his past, the answers to the ultimate riddle of his fate. As Marco journeys from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah, he encounters a gallery of characters and a series of events as rich and surprising as any in modern fiction.Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, and illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is the most entertaining and moving novel yet from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.
From New York Times-bestselling author Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy).

Moon Palace (Contemporary American Fiction)

The remarkable, acclaimed series of interconnected detective novels – from the author of 4 3 2 1: A Novel
The New York Review of Books has called Paul Auster's work “one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself. In Ghosts, Blue, a mentee of Brown, is hired by White to spy on Black from a window on Orange Street. Once Blue starts stalking Black, he finds his subject on a similar mission, as well. In The Locked Room, Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and nothing but a cache of novels, plays, and poems.

The New York Trilogy: City of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room (Contemporary American Fiction Series)

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