Paul Auster Died

 Paul Auster died yesterday, for me the writer of The New York Trilogy and The Brooklyn Follies (both of which I read in prison; I prefer the former to the latter, but Follies has a definite charm and may be an easier place to start), but before I read him I saw the movie Smoke. That was a lovely film. 

LitHub has an obit, Paul Auster has died at age 77.

Paul Auster, beloved American writer, died yesterday at 77, at his home in Brooklyn. Auster rose to prominence in the mid 1980s with his widely beloved “New York Trilogy,” beginning with City of Glass, which was rejected 17 times before finally being published in 1985. (Though it should be said that Auster’s 1982 memoir, The Invention of Solitude, was reviewed in the New York Times by no less a writer than WS Merwin).

Auster, also a poet and translator from French, brought a distinctly Gallic flair to both his writing and his life, employing a deftly beautiful postmodern mixture of the lyrical and the hardboiled, borrowing as effortlessly from American genre as he did from continental formalism.

The New York Times Obit: Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn, Dies at 77. 

The Guardian's obit, Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77:

Auster was better known in Europe than in his native United States: “Merely a bestselling author in these parts,” read a 2007 New York magazine article, “Auster is a rock star in Paris.” In 2006, he was awarded Spain’s Prince of Asturias prize for literature, and in 1993 he was given the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He was also a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

With my attitude towards literary Brooklyn, I ought not to be missing him, but I do. Maybe it is because I heard him interviewed on NPR (Fresh Air?), or read an interview after he published his Stephen Crane biography (which is on my never-ending, always expanding list of books I should have read by now).

The Honest Broker has a piece on The New York Trilogy here.

He also wrote on gun violence: Paul Auster: Why Is America the Most Violent Country in the Western World?

sch