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“... Paul Auster is so implicated in his own fictions that it is often hard to tell whether his covert appearances there represent a Modernist textual teasing or a baser vanity; whether his walk-on parts are self-mocking or aggrandising. In City of Glass, the first volume in the New York Trilogy, the writer’s identity is always a plaything: Quinn, the writer, uses the pseudonym William Wilson, who himself writes about the improbably named Max Work, and is mistaken for Paul Auster, ‘of the Auster Detective Agency ...”

“... Paul Auster is an amphibious writer whose eclectic methods and influences make one unsure by which end to try and grasp him. His early self-exile to an apprenticeship in Paris as a poet and translator, absorbing the lessons of the ‘high’ aesthetic rigorists – Beckett, Blanchot, Jabès, Celan – was an unexpected preliminary to his return to America and, after several years, his dark, formally self-conscious entry onto the scene of the American novel with The New York Trilogy, an elaborate anti-detective volume full of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau ...”

“... For a long time, Paul Auster’s novels were much more popular in France than in America. Perhaps this is because he sounds more convincing in French. ‘Ecrivain de la mégapole, de l’errance et du hasard, Paul Auster est devenu un auteur culte,’ one Parisian blurb-artist writes, catching the appeal in a way that his English-speaking counterparts find difficult ...”

“... goods which surround them. They have none of the insecurity and anonymity of the figures who haunt Paul Auster’s vision of the modern city. Though The New York Trilogy outlines a comparable cityscape of streets and apartment blocks, its characters do not even have names, only aliases. Crime and detection are paramount themes in both ...”

“... bother to try to compute the odds against this happening, and left it as a sharp earful of what Paul Auster calls ‘the music of chance’.Salaman, Buruma and Auster are all connoisseurs of the incongruous connection, all adept stringers-along of the reader into tantalisingly incomplete networks of ...”

“... A couple of years ago, Paul Auster was asked by a producer at National Public Radio whether he would become a regular contributor to one of the network’s more popular shows. All he’d have to do was come up with a story every month or so and read it aloud. Daunted by the prospect – what writer has plotlines to spare? – Auster was about to decline, when his wife, Siri Hustvedt, who is also a novelist, came up with a suggestion ...”

“... too. The same can’t be said of Here and Now, a collection of communications between Coetzee and Paul Auster sent between July 2008 – a month after Kannemeyer’s approach – and August 2011. This extraordinary book comes with no explanations other than the flap copy: Although Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had ...”

“... but which remain obtrusive. One is left wishing for more matter with less art. The city of Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things is not located in either time or space, and this freedom from historical contingency enables him to construct a lean dystopian fable of unusual cogency and power. The novel’s epigraph – from Hawthorne this ...”

“... Paul Auster​ ’s new novel, 4321, is a lightly edited two-inch-thick Bildungsroman divided into four timelines, each a possible iteration of a single character’s life. That character is born at the end of a prologue consisting mostly of family prehistory: Russian Jews emigrate to New York and bear a child, Stanley; Stanley marries comely Rose, and they beget our protagonist, Archie Ferguson ...”

“... from 4 per cent to 95.6 per cent, the bulk of The Iron Whim concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines ...”

“... and themes which will make enough noise to fill up the silence of the great open spaces. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace is a ‘Western’ novel executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony ...”

“... the manuscript of the translation was lost. It was miraculously rediscovered by the translator, Paul Auster, twenty years later. This delay has resulted in some anachronisms, notably in certain turns of phrase and the evocation of obsolete anthropological theories (e.g. the Atchei are described as a ‘primitive Stone Age tribe’), but they do not ...”

“... asparagus in soy but purple and orange pastries for pudding) I sat with Yu Shi, who has translated Paul Auster as well as writing novels about young women in the city. She was 12 in 1989, and saw herself as part of a distinct generation with different concerns from those that came before. She wanted to know about censorship in the UK: ‘Don’t you have ...”

“... meant to dismantle or diffuse. That thought might go some way towards a charitable reading of Paul Auster’s Timbuktu, ‘a love-story’ between a dog and his master. Mr Bones is an all-American mongrel, ‘a hodge-podge of genetic strains’ (Auster compares him to other US immigrants), who’s also a model of ...”

“... repudiates ‘the monster of reason, mechanical reason’. In his recent exchange of letters with Paul Auster, Coetzee blamed ‘the quantificatory spirit’ for the financial crash of 2008, and suggested that if we are all suddenly poorer because ‘certain numbers changed’, perhaps we should change the numbers back so that they more accurately ...”