The New York Trilogy

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Education: Columbia High School, New Jersey; 1965-69 Columbia College, New York; '69-70 Columbia University, New York (quit after one year) This chronicler of New York was, in fact, born in New Jersey, conceived in a "loveless embrace, a blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets", as he writes in The Invention of Solitude, on his parents' honeymoon at Niagara Falls. His mother, Queenie, who died earlier this year, was a bright and sparky woman, able to make jokes and tell stories to her son even as her beloved second husband, Auster's step-father, was dying. The connection between self and world has been broken", a description which foreshadows many of the books Auster wrote two decades later. "There are very few writers I've discovered since then who have affected my work at all. I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn't understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Rushdie, though, is sceptical: "I'm not sure if I agree that Paul's technique has changed that much. There is always a strong element of fantasy in his stories. In the early works it's probably more elliptical than fantastical, but just look at Lulu on the Bridge , for example, which has a strong element of fantasy." And then, he says with unembarrassed sentimentality, using a sentence that sounds like a line from one of his novels, "The great miracle happened, and everything changed." Auster's first major success, the extraordinary New York Trilogy (1987), a thoughtful, at times terrifying, tripartite novel, must be one of the few books you can buy in airport bookshops about the annihilation of identity in the urban world. I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”To explore the themes, Yanagihara uses four different chacracters, all recent graduates of a prestigious college in New England who move to New York to—what else?—chase their dreams in law, acting, art and architecture. The lawyer, Jude, becomes the undisputed protagonist whom readers want to look away from given his self-harming tendencies but can't.

At first read, Jay McInerney's much talked about 1984noveldoesn't feel like an authetic exploration of New York. Somethingaboutit simply feels too extra and almost made up. The Age of Innocence is, perhaps, the most widelyread and for good reason: Wharton won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction after publishing it and officially became the first woman to ever be granted the accolade. Despite, or perhaps because of his rather unliterary upbringing - his mother had "no particular interest in writing" and his father, who died before Paul achieved critical success, was bemused by how he had "produced a poet for a son" - Auster has a very traditional view of the role of the author, almost self-consciously so. In Hand to Mouth he writes, "Becoming a writer... [you] don't choose it so much as get chosen." Lauterbach agrees: "Ever since I've known him, Paul has wanted to be a writer with a capital W." The moment comes when you're formed and you can't be influenced any more," he says. Lauterbach says that, in Auster's case, this is probably true, but not always to his benefit: "The themes in Paul's books haven't changed since when I first met him more than 20 years ago: he's still looking at the nature of fate; he's still looking at how events impact on a person; he's still looking at the effect of chance."In the past few years, novels about New York have been criticized as not necessarily capturing the essence of a city in the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, Toni Morrison, Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe have been able to do decades ago.That all changed whenGarth Risk Hallberg's City on Fire, the author's first ever novel, was released in 2015. It is incredibly hard to write about New York, a city defined by itsdiversity of character and spirit—but that's exactly why we deem the best books set in or about New York to be some of the most incredible additions to the American literary canon, period. Perhaps it is this combination that has so endeared him to New York, a city that prides itself on its cynicism, but has a Santa Claus on every corner at Christmas. "New York is not just a place, it's an idea," he says. "It's this idea of an all-welcoming city of immigrants where everyone can be a New Yorker." Even a sentimental storyteller from New Jersey. Employment: Census taker; oil tank utilityman on the Esso Florence; translator; 1997 juror, Cannes Film Festival; '86-90 tutor in storywriting and translation, Princeton University Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18196 Openlibrary_edition

The storyis aboutthirty-something Joan, an ICU doctor working at a Manhattan hospital whose parents returned to China following her and her brother Fang's move to New York and the establishment of the siblings' respective careers. Equally reminiscentof The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Goldfinch in terms of tone and themes explored, City on Fire chronicles the aftermath of a shooting thatoccurs in Central Park on New Year's Eve in the 1970s, bringing readers face to face with a number of very New York City-like characters while exploringsubjects likeracism and violence thatunfortunately still plague town today. Siri likes to say it was love at first sight, but it wasn't for me," Auster says. "For me, it took about, oh, I don't know, 10 minutes." Almost all anecdotes about Auster from his friends involve Paul and Siri together. "Paul would never talk to me about his work because he doesn't need to - he has Siri. They are one another's best critics," says Rushdie. They married the following year, five days after his divorce from Davis was finalised. In Leviathan he writes: "Iris had become my happy ending." This 1987 Tom Wolfe novelis by many considered to be the quintessential New York work of fiction, originally conceived as a series of books that ran in Rolling Stone magazineacross 27 installments starting in 1984. It is astounding to think that the author of the literarymasterpiece that is In Cold Blood is the same one who gifted the world Breakfast at Tiffany's.Eminently readable and mysterious. . .Auster has added some new dimensions to modern literature, and – more importantly even – to our perspectives on our planet.”