Bøger af Paul Auster

From The New York Trilogy to The Book of Illusions, Paul Auster's novels have earned him a reputation as "one of American's most spectacularly inventive writers." Here, published together for the first time, are the screenplays of the three films he made in the 1990s.Smoke (starring Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, and Stockard Channing) tells the story of a novelist, a cigar store manager, and a black teenager who unexpectedly cross paths and end up changing each other's lives in indelible ways.Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Smoke directly inspired Blue in the Face, a largely improvised comedy shot in a total of six days. A film unlike any other it stars Harvey Keitel, with featured performances by Roseanne, Lily Tomlin, Lou Reed, and Michael J. Fox.Lulu on the Bridge (Auster's solo directorial debut, again starring Harvey Keitel, with Mira Sorvino, Willem Dafoe, and Vanessa Redgrave) opens with the accidental shooting of jazz musician Izzy Maurer during a performance in a New York club. Izzy is then led on a journey into the strange and sometimes frightening labyrinth of his soul. Both thriller and fairy tale, Lulu on the Bridge is above all a story about the redemptive powers of love.

This collection of Paul Auster screenplays brings together the film work of a writer whose novels have earned him the reputation as 'one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers.' (Times Literary Supplement) Auster has also brought this sense of restless invention to the art of screenwriting, producing Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge and The Inner Life of Martin Frost.The prize-winning Smoke tells the story of a novelist, a cigar store manager, and a black teenager who unexpectedly cross paths and end up changing each other's lives in indelible ways. Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Smoke directly inspired Blue in the Face, a largely improvised comedy shot in a total of six days.Lulu on the Bridge is both a thriller and a fairy tale: when jazz musician Izzy Maurer is accidentally hit by a bullet during a performance in a New York club, he is led on a journey into the strange and sometimes frightening labyrinth of his soul. The Inner Life of Martin Frost follows the mysterious and unsettling experiences that befall writer Martin Frost when he borrows a friend's country house and sets out to write a story about elusive and impossible love.The volume also contains production notes, as well as interviews with Paul Auster about his work in film.

The figure of the young American poet living in Paris is familiar from Paul Auster's celebrated novels; here that character is realised in Auster's own stunningly accomplished verse. His penetrating and charged poetry resembles little else in recent American literature. This collection of his poems, translations, and composition notes from early in his career furnish yet further evidence of his literary mastery. Taut, densely lyrical and everywhere informed by a powerful and subtle music, this selection begins with the compact verse fragments of Spokes (written when Auster was in his early twenties) and Unearth, continues on through the more ample meditations of Wall Writing, Disappearances, Effigies, Fragments From the Cold, Facing the Music, and White Spaces, then moves further back in time to include Auster's revealing translations of many of the French poets who influenced his own writing - including Paul Eluard, Andr, Breton, Tristan Tzara, Philippe Soupault, Robert Desnos and Ren, Char - as well as the provocative and previously unpublished 'Notes From A Composition Book' (1967). An introduction by Norman Finkelstein connects biographical elements to a consideration of the work, and takes in Auster's early literary and philosophical influences. For those interested in Paul Auster's novels - the now-classic New York Trilogy or The Brooklyn Follies - this book is an invaluable opportunity to witness his early development.Powerful, sometimes haunting, cool, precise and limpid, this view from the past to the present will appeal to those unfamiliar with this aspect of Auster's work, as well as those already acquainted with his poetry. Readers will agree that Auster's grasp on language and the world around him is not only questioning, but mysterious and very human, perceptive, and deeply compelling

A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art SpiegelmanQuinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a "post-existentialist private eye." An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language."[This graphic novel] is, surprisingly, not just a worthy supplement to the novel, but a work of art that fully justifies its existence on its own terms."--The Guardian

This volume of Paul Auster's collected novels includes Travels in the Scriptorium, Man in the Dark, Invisible and Sunset Park.

'In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts . . .'Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally best-selling novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within, through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world, as well as through a selection of the revealing letters he sent to his first wife, acclaimed author Lydia Davis.An impressionistic portrait of a writer coming of age, Report from the Interior moves from Auster's baby's-eye view of the man in the moon to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life. Report from the Interior charts Auster's moral, political and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the post-war fifties and into the turbulent 1960s.Paul Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life - and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the book breaks away from prose into pure imagery: the final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts, told in an album of pictures.At once a story of the times and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.

'One day there is life . . . And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.'So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood, The Invention of Solitude. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and feelings after the death of his father. In 'The Book of Memory' the perspective shifts to Auster's role as a father. The narrator, 'A.', contemplates his separation from his son, his dying grandfather and the solitary nature of writing and story-telling. With all the keen literary intelligence familiar from The New York Trilogy or Sunset Park, Paul Auster crafts an intensely intimate work from a ground-breaking combination of introspection, meditation and biography.

Oracle Night is a compulsively readable novel by 'one of the great writers of our time.' (San Francisco Chronicle).Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in 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.If The New York Trilogy was Paul Auster's detective story, his mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book - only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today. 'His old-fashioned art of creating suspense . . . which rivals M. R. James or Conan Doyle. In fact, Oracle Night is best read as a post-modern ghost story.' The Guardian

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

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.

Martin Frost sets out for a country house to write his novel away from the distractions of the city. Thinking that he is the sole occupant of the house, he is surprised and annoyed when he discovers a young woman in residence. She is similarly disturbed by his presence. They begin a passionate affair, which reaches an intriguing climax when he has to choose between his life and his art. Written and directed by Paul Auster, The Inner Life of Martin Frost shows him at his mesmerizing best, juggling fiction and reality. The film stars David Thewlis (from Mike Leigh's Naked), Irene Jacob (The Double Life of Veronique), Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos), and Sophie Auster (Lulu on the Bridge), and joins Paul Auster's other much-loved works of cinema, such as Smoke and Blue in the Face.

'I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.' Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would rather forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder, in Iraq, of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. Brill, a retired book critic, imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the Twin Towers did not fall on 9/11, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts another hidden story, this time of his own marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus's death.Passionate and shocking, political and personal: Man in the Dark is a novel that reflects the consequences of 9/11, that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

'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

'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.

In this acrobatic and virtuosic collection, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature. In a selection of interviews, as well as in the essay 'The Red Notebook' itself, Auster reflects upon his own work, on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing, and on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Red Notebook both illuminates and undermines our accepted notions about literature, and guides us towards a finer understanding of the dangerously high stakes involved in writing. It also includes Paul Auster's impassioned essay 'A Prayer for Salman Rushdie', as well as a set of striking and bittersweet reminiscences collected under the apposite title, 'Why Write?'

Jim Nashe er brandmand, familiefar og et helt igennem ansvarsfuldt menneske. Hans hverdag er præget af et job, hvor han skal redde andre og en familie, der er afhængig af ham. Nashes liv er på mange måder et godt liv. Men noget mangler – hans egen autentiske tilstedeværelse. Da Nashes arver en stor sum penge, beslutter han sig bogstaveligt talt for at indtage førersædet i sin tilværelse. Han forlader familien og kører rundt på må og få. Turen, har han besluttet, skal vare indtil pengene er sluppet op. Skæbnen spiller herefter Nash et puds, da han støder ind i den temperamentsfulde gambler Pozzi, og sammen sætter de den sidste rest af arven på spil. I "Tilfældets musik" vender Auster tilbage det litterære motiv, der efterhånden er blevet hans kendetegn: Det moderne menneskes følelse af at være fremmed for sit eget liv.

Walt er ni år, forældreløs og usædvanligt grov i munden. Walts liv ændrer sig markant, da han en dag møder den mystiske Mester Yehudi, som ser et lys i den unge dreng. Mester Yehudi overtaler Walt til at tage med ham. Hjemme hos Mester Yehudi lære Walt at ophæve tyngdekraften ved hjælp af sine tanker. Efter flere års træning sker det så endelig - Walt letter fra jorden. Mester Yehudi og Walt the Wonder Boy begynder at turnerer USA tyndt med tryllenummeret. Men da de kommer til New York, oplever Walt pludselig svimmelhed, og med ét må Walt kæmpe med sin angst for Mr. Vertigo.

'Alle Auster-fans skal naturligvis læse 'Mr Vertigo' og for begyndere er den en god indgang til et af tidens mest væsentlige og vedkommende forfatterskaber.' - Bo Tao Micha+lis, Politiken.

Romanen om Foggs tilværelse i en verden fyldt med gribende tilfældighed.Marco Stanley Fogg er forældreløs, tresserbarn, af natur en oplevelsesrejsende, åndelig såvel som legemelig. Moon Palace er hans historie, en roman som strækker sig over tre generationer, fra forrige århundredes begyndelse til de første månelandinger, og som bevæger sig fra Manhattans slugter til det vestlige Amerikas grusomt smukke landskaber. Romanen fører ubesværet læseren af sted med Marco i hans søgen efter kærlighed, efter den ukendte far og nøglen til hans oprindelse og skæbnens uhåndgribelige rødder.Moon Palace er fuld af spænding, usandsynlige sammentræf, hjerteskærende tragedier og vidunderlige lyriske passager. PRESSEN SKREV"Måske er MOON PALACE en af Paul Austers bedste romaner, fordi den både er vemodig, muntert henrykkende og uamerikansk...MOON PALACE er en kærlig og vildt fabulerende fortælling om det allermest luftige og ihærdigt opdageragtige i amerikansk mentalitet... MOON PALACE er især to ting. En medrivende fortælling og en original fornyelse af den gode gamle historie: Go West - og find dig selv." - Connie Bork i Politiken."Austers mænd lever efter john Wayne-modellen: "An man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." De er som semiotiske cowboys i det store amerikanske bibliotek. Man det helt fantastiske ved Moon Palace er netop også, at den både kan læses som en slags dannelsesroman - fuld af mystiske mænd, mord, vold, sindsyge, sex, prøvelser og pludselig rigdom - og som selv- og skriftbevidst, postmodernistisk tekst. Den er sprogligt rigere og episk fyldigere ende nogen af hans andre bøger, men er samtidig lige så diamantskarp og svimlende." - Henrik List i Berlingske Tidende.OM FORFATTERENPaul Benjamin Auster - forfatteren til New York-trilogien, Illusionernes bog, Moon Palace, Brooklyn dårskab, Tilfældets musik. Paul Auster har skrevet indtil flere romaner, hvor tilfældet spiller en stor rolle som eksempelvis i New York trilogien, der er en ganske atypisk krimi. Auster har vundet flere priser for sine bøger og har en god personlig kontakt med sit danske forlag, hvilket har betydet, at en del af hans bøger er udkommet i Danmark, før de er udkommet i USA. Privat er Paul Auster gift med forfatterinden Siri Hustvedt.

Romanen foregår over én lang, søvnløs nat i August Brills liv. For at slå tiden ihjel, digter han for sig selv historien om den unge Owen Brick som vågner op i et hul i en parallel verden. Owen befinder sig midt i en ny amerikansk territorialkrig og får det ultimatum enten at blive likvideret eller selv likvidere en forfatter ved navn ... August Brill ... manden, der har opfundet den parallelle verden og holder krigen kørende ved fortsat at digte den. Den virkelige, søvnløse Brill er indlogeret hos sin datter Miriam og sit barnebarn Katya. Alle tre er de i færd med at pleje de sår, som livet i en ny og omskiftelig verden år 2007 har påført dem. Paul Auster leger igen uforudsigeligt og mesterligt med sine fortællinger som han indlejrer i hinanden. handler om smule om krig og en masse om kærlighed, kærlighedens pludselige ophør og kærlighedens helende kraft.OM BOGENbesnærende og vedrørende læsning for enhver, der gør sig tanker om krig og kærlighed i den verden, vi lever i. - Information... en varm, gribende og opløftende læseoplevelse. ... Hvis man tidligere har stiftet bekendtskab med værker af en af den amerikanske litteraturs grand old man, vil man nikke genkendende til romanens klassiske austerske træk og tematikker. Hvad betinger de valg, vi træffer, og hvordan påvirker de andre? Hvad er årsag, og hvad er virkning? Er det, vi tror er tilfældigheder, i virkeligheden en del af et større forudbestemt hele? - LitteratursidenDet summer i hovedet af anstrengende, raffineret nydelse, når man læser Paul Auster, der med Mand i mørke trækker store veksler på sin læsers tålmodighed, men slipper godt fra det, fordi han er en forvirringskunstner, der behersker det underlige som virkemiddel. - Klaus Rothstein