Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1090250 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .27 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

From Amazon.com
It's no wonder that Paul Auster (The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo) creates such singular characters. While his youth comprised a series of failures too unbelievable for fiction, it also equipped him with a range of experiences to draw from that most fiction writers only dream of. He worked with Bowery bums at a summer camp, had a childhood friend join the Weather Underground, and was a student at Columbia in 1968 at the height of the student uprisings there (and at which point, he boasts, he knew seven of the FBI's ten most wanted men). He worked on an oil tanker, for a French Mafia-style film producer in Paris, and for a rare-book organization in New York. He translated the North Vietnamese constitution from French into English (don't ask). His work brought him in contact to varying extents with Jean Genet, Mary McCarthy, Jerzy Kosinski, Sartre, Foucault, and John Lennon. The encounters and experiences must have been fascinating, failure aside, but Auster's prose here, sadly, lacks the tightness and luster of his fiction. The remainder--and major portion--of the volume consists of three plays, a baseball card game, and a detective novel, all written during this time.

From Library Journal
Coming upon this "chronicle of early failure," readers of translator, poet, screenwriter, and novelist Auster (Mr. Vertigo, LJ 6/15/94) may be charmed by his new publisher's presentation though left puzzled by the derivative offerings. The work consists of one original, down-beat essay, "Hand to Mouth," a flat record of Auster's inauspicious early years struggling to make money while writing (the essay was recently excerpted in Granta), and three appendixes: a medley of Beckett-inspired plays, an "action baseball" card game that Auster was convinced would make his fortune, and a Chandleresque detective novel, "Squeeze Play"?all of which failed in one way or another when first created. Auster's collection of essays and reviews, The Art of Hunger (Sun & Moon, 1991), develop more fully and satisfactorily the author's literary development, while the appendixes here will interest few but devoted literary archivists.
-?Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Auster's novels, from City of Glass (1985) to The Music of Chance (1990) and Mr. Vertigo (1994), are taut psychological dramas that revolve around odd and stressful relationships between mentor and student, con man and sucker, and seem dictated solely by randomness. Auster himself is camouflaged by the intricate patterns of his highly cerebral fiction, but readers of this meticulous memoir, an often alarming, unfailingly astonishing account of his long, frustrating journey into print, will find many anecdotes eerily familiar. Each interlude in Auster's willfully improvised life--from summer jobs that generated mismatched friendships with heavy-drinking drifters to his years at Columbia at the height of the sixties, the stints on board oil tankers, his desperately intuitive life in Paris, and his patchy freelance editing and translating gigs (endeavors that sound innocent but which, for Auster, were strangely dangerous)--is a template for scenes in his cunning novels. Profoundly complex and temperamentally unsuited for the nine-to-five world, Auster even tried to solve his financial difficulties by peddling an intricately designed card game he invented called Action Baseball, which is reproduced here as an appendix, along with three of his plays, and his first novel, a pseudonymous mystery. This fascinating volume of new and old works provides an extraordinary glimpse into the tough early years of a major literary figure, who now has two terrific films to his credit, Smoke and Blue in the Face, but it also proves the wiliness of Auster's talent: ever enigmatic and elusive, he leaves as much of his true self in shadow as in light. Donna Seaman