The interview was completed one afternoon this summer at Auster’s home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt. The following conversation started last fall with a live interview at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Oracle Night, his ninth novel, will be published later this year.

He has also written three screenplays: Smoke (1995), Blue in the Face (1995), and Lulu on the Bridge(1998), which he directed as well. The range of Auster’s work is remarkable-novels, essays, translations, poems, plays, songs, and collaborations with artists (including Sophie Calle and Sam Messer).

Auster was made a chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 1991 (he was elevated to an officer in 1997). His other novels include Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), and The Book of Illusions (2002). In 1982, Auster published his first prose book, The Invention of Solitude, a memoir and meditation on fatherhood that he started writing shortly after his father’s death.Īuster has published a book almost annually since the trilogy: In 1987 the novel In the Country of Last Things appeared. He returned to New York City in 1974 and, among other ventures, tried to sell a baseball card game he had invented. In 1972 his first book, a collection of translations titled A Little Anthology of Surrealist Poems, was published. He started a little magazine, Little Hand, and an independent publishing house of the same name with his first wife, the writer Lydia Davis. He studied at Columbia University in the late sixties, then worked for a few months on an oil tanker before moving to Paris where he eked out a living as a translator. Although he wrote reviews and translations regularly and his prose poem White Spaceshad been published in 1980, the trilogy marked the true start of his literary career.Īuster has written about those prepublication years in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure (1997). The other two novellas, Ghosts and The Locked Room, came out the next year. In 1985, after seventeen New York publishers had rejected City of Glass, the lead novella in The New York Trilogy, it was published by Sun and Moon Press in San Francisco. Interviewed by Michael Wood Issue 167, Fall 2003

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