White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose

Poetry by Paul Auster

White Spaces gathers the poetry and prose of Paul Auster from various small-press books issued throughout the seventies. These early poetic works are crucial for understanding the evolution of Auster’s writing. Taut, lyrical, and always informed by a powerful and subtle music, his poems begin with basics—a swallow’s egg, stones, roots, thistle, “the glacial rose”—and push language to the breaking point. As Robert Creeley wrote, “The enduring power of these early poems is their moving address to a world all too elusive, too fragmented, and too bitterly transient.…
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The Red Notebook

Nonfiction by Paul Auster

The Red Notebook stories, pulled from Auster’s own life or from the lives of those close to him, are explorations of unexpected coincidences. A wrong number becomes the genesis for a famous novel; a hero appears at an inopportune moment; a lightning storm harries a group of campers; a daughter plunges from a terrifying height only to land improbably safely; a Paul Auster imposter materializes. Like a magic show, The Red Notebook demonstrates that “there is much to life that is special and serendipitous — if only we allow ourselves to perceive it this way” (The Washington Post).…
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The Red Notebook

Nonfiction by Paul Auster

Paul Auster has earned international praise for the imaginative power of his many novels, including The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo, and Timbuktu. He has also published a number of highly original nonfiction works: The Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth, and The Art of Hunger. In The Red Notebook, Auster again explores events from the real world – large and small, tragic and comic – that reveal the unpredictable, shifting nature of human experience.…
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On the High Wire

Nonfiction by Philippe Petit

Translated by Paul Auster

In this poetic handbook, written when he was just twenty-three, the world-famous high-wire artist Philippe Petit offers a window into the world of his craft. Petit masterfully explains how preparation and self-control contributed to such feats as walking between the towers of Notre Dame and the World Trade Center. Addressing such topics as the rigging of the wire, the walker’s first steps, his salute and exercises, and the work of other renowned high-wire artists, Petit offers us a book about the ecstasy of conquering our fears and reaching for the stars.…
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A Tomb For Anatole

Poetry by Stéphane Mallarmé

Translated by Paul Auster

The great French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who changed the course of modern French literature, suffered many tragedies, but the cruelest blow of all struck in 1879, when his beloved son Anatole died at the age of eight. His unbearable grief inspired him to attempt a major work. A Tomb for Anatole presents the 202 fragments of Mallarmé’s projected long poem in four parts, by far the poet’s most personal work, and one he could never bring himself to complete.…
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From the spook of ‘Spokes’ and the parabolic philosophical chiaroscuro of ‘White Spaces’ to the gnomic sighs of what’s in between, Paul Auster’s poems shimmer at the edges with audacious grace and uncanny soulfulness.
—Charles Bernstein
Anyone interested in the origins of Paul Auster’s art, its ground, will find these intense early sequences, these liminal austerities, of great interest. Auster’s is a poetry of extreme lyric condensation.
—Michael Palmer
A genuine American original.
—The Boston Globe
A genuine American original.
—The Boston Globe
Paul Auster is definitely a genius.
—Haruki Murakami
The arresting stories in this slim collection by Auster … go a long way toward answering the perennial question “Why write?”
—Ana Luísa Amaral, Publishers Weekly
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