Author(s): Paul Auster

Essays / Literary Studies

Even Before the publication of his earliest novels, Paul Auster was exploring what he has called "the mechanics of reality," or, quite simply, "the strange things that happen to us" in the two works that comprise The Invention of Solitude: "Portrait of an Invisible Man" and "The Book of Memory." After the release of the groundbreaking New York Trilogy in the mid-eighties, Auster has gone on with his lyrical, speculative, and often humorous investigations of the real world in several sequences of true stories-"The Red Notebook," "Why Write?," "Accident Report," and "It Don't Mean a Thing"-as well as in three books. Hand to Mouth chronicles Auster's struggles as a young writer with empty pockets bouncing from one odd job to another and trying to solve the eternal problem of how to live on next to nothing. The much lauded Winter Journal is an unorthodox, beautifully wrought tracing of the journey from youth to old age as seen through the history of one man's body, and Report from the Interior delves into the inner world of boyhood, a dogged excavation of buried memory-fragments that plowed the emotional ground for Auster's 2017 masterpiece, 4 3 2 1. All true, and yet often so startling as to challenge the notion of truth, the nine works gathered in this collection spring from personal experiences but cannot be read as traditional autobiographies or memoirs. Auster's aim is not to tell the story of himself so much as to use himself as an example of anyone-or everyone-to grapple with the mysteries of human life that are common to us all. Groundwork presents the full range of discoveries made by this essential American writer on his long quest to penetrate the workings of the world. Book jacket.