The New York Trilogy

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Aside from Hustvedt, autobiographical echoes resound through Auster's fiction. His conversation is punctuated with "and you know that scene in such-a-such book? Well, that happened to me!" and "remember that time in that chapter? That's a true story!" He fled to New York to study at Columbia in 1965, but the sense of isolation went with him. As he had done at home, he hid by "reading like a demon. Really, I think every idea I have came to me in those years. I don't think I've had a new idea since I was 20." When Hawaiiannovelist Hanya Yanagihara released A Little Life in 2015, the world noticed—and everyone seems to still be talking about it. The1943 semi-autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyntakes place in the Williamsburg of days yore, before world-renowned restaurants and super-tall skyscrapers revolutionized thearea and brought itone step closer to Manhattan.

Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.” The 2000 novel did win the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 2001, after all. What's more, Bret Easton Ellis even called it "one of the three great books of my generation" alongside Jonthan Franzen's The Corrections and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. 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. Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18196 Openlibrary_editionNot quite like any other entry on this list, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is a series of novels that were first published sequentially but have since been presented in a single volume. 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. Auster harnesses the inquiring spirit any reader brings to a mystery, redirecting it from the grubby search for a wrongdoer to the more rarified search for self.” Strikingly, Auster, who almost always writes in the first person both in fiction and non-fiction, becomes in the story of his own life, "A". The distance created by slipping from first to third person reads like a quiet sigh of denial and loneliness, of someone who, he writes, was "living to the side of himself". It was not a happy marriage," he says, in his deep, measured voice with a slight smoker's growl. "But I don't think I particularly suffered from it." A popular, sporty child, he morphed into withdrawn, angry teenager. His younger sister, always a fragile girl, simply, he says, "snapped in her 20s and has never put herself together again".

Although published in 1973, the novel clearly explores topics that are at the heart of today's culture, especially given New York's devotion to the concept of celebrity and the constant paparazzi that swirm around town. Clearly referring to racial passing, a term thatcalls out to the practice of presenting oneself as belonging to a different racial group given ambiguous physical attributes, this 1929 novel by Nella Larsen was ahead of its time, likely given the author's own mixed heritge. Basically any book by Edith Wharton belongs on a best books about New York list, but, frankly, not every Wharton book is for everyone. That's likely due to the candid nature of the author's writing and subject matter: trauma, disability, depression, shame and chronic pain. Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt, a blonde willow of a woman with a surprisingly strong handshake and a sharp jawline, at a poetry reading on February 23 1981, a date he preserves for posterity in Leviathan, in which the hero, Peter, meets Iris (hold a mirror up to that name) in a similar situation, and, gushingly, mistakes her for "a fashion model - an error that most people still make when seeing her for the first time".

Fromalways-referred to classics like The Bonfire of the Vanitiesby Tom Wolfe andBetty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to more recent publications like Hanya Yanagihara's soul-crushing A Little Life, this unranked list makes up what we believe to be any New Yorker's essential reading compilation. Eminently readable and mysterious. . .Auster has added some new dimensions to modern literature, and – more importantly even – to our perspectives on our planet.”