by Paul Auster
Considering what we have to look forward to, it is pleasant to dream of these absurdities. The thaw seems imminent now, and there is even a chance that we will leave tomorrow morning. That was how we left it before going to bed: if the sky looks promising, we will be off without another word. It is deep into the night now, and the wind is blowing through the cracks in the house. Everyone else is asleep, and I am sitting downstairs in the kitchen, trying to imagine what is ahead of me. I cannot imagine it. I cannot even begin to think of what will happen to us out there. Anything is possible, and that is almost the same as nothing, almost the same as being born into a world that has never existed before. Perhaps we will find William after we leave the city, but I try not to hope too much. The only thing I ask for now is the chance to live one more day. This is Anna Blume, your old friend from another world. Once we get to where we are going, I will try to write to you again, I promise.
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More by Paul Auster, “a literary original who is perfecting a genre of his own” (Wall Street Journal)—all available in Penguin
MR. VERTIGO ISBN: 0-14-032190-0
A mysterious Hungarian teaches a St. Louis orphan to levitate, and they take their vaudeville act across the vast and vibrant America of the 1920s and 30s. “A charmer pure and simple … nothing less than the story of America itself”—The Washington Post
THE ART OF HUNGER ISBN: 0-14-017168-1
Auster reflects on his own work and traces the compulsion to make literature (or art) through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Laura Riding, Knut Hamsun, John Ashbery, and other seminal figures of the twentieth century.
IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS ISBN: 0-14-009705-8
A woman searches for her brother in a devastated and violent world. “Reminiscent in many ways of Orwell’s 1984 … Auster creates a place so real it could be our own country, perhaps our very own city.”—Atlanta Journal Constitution
THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE ISBN: 0-14-010628-6
Auster’s moving and personal meditation on fatherhood “integrates heart and intellect, sensation and speculation … as it relentlessly tries to make sense of the shocks of living.”—Newsday
LEVIATHAN ISBN: 0-14-017813-9
When his friend Benjamin Sachs blows himself up by the side of the road, it launches Peter Aaron on an investigation into the nature of friendship and betrayal, sexual desire and estrangement, and the unpredictable intrusions of violence in the everyday.
MOON PALACE ISBN: 0-14-011585-4
This “beautiful and haunting” (San Francisco Chronicle) book follows Marco Stanley Fogg, a child of the sixties, from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah in search of answers to the ultimate riddle of his fate.
THE MUSIC OF CHANCE ISBN: 0-14-015407-8
Drifters Jim Nashe and Jack Pozzi enter a poker game against two rich eccentrics, and risk their freedom on the single blind turn of a card. “All the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller” (The New York Times) and the basis for the critically acclaimed movie.
THE NEW YORK TRILOGY ISBN: 0-14-013155-8
Auster’s novels City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room comprise an “electrifying … work of manifest originality, if not genius” (San Francisco Examiner) and “a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer-detective who’s never satisfied with just the facts.” (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Also available as a single volume:
CITY OF GLASS ISBN: 0-14-009731-7