When Paul Auster passed away in 2024, the literary world lost one of its most idiosyncratic voices — a novelist who folded noir into philosophy, chance into narrative structure, and America into its own surreal dreamscape. For over four decades, Auster blurred the lines between fate and free will, wrestling with coincidence, existential crisis, and the quiet ache of human connection.
Born in Newark in 1947, Auster came of age amid the restless years of postwar America; following comparative literature studies at Columbia, he fled to Paris, eking out a living translating French writers like Mallarmé and Blanchot. His breakthrough came in 1985 with City of Glass, the first in the New York Trilogy — a detective triptych that dismantled the genre and catapulted him to cult status.
From there, he carved a distinct niche in American letters: blending melancholy and paranoia with metafictional play to craft tales of identity lost and remade in the chaos of city living. His characters — often alienated, untethered, or invisible — chase meaning through urban mazes, trying to make sense of systems that are indifferent, if not outright hostile, to their existence. In The Music of Chance, a man is imprisoned by absurd wealth; in Moon Palace, a drifting young man stumbles through history and heartbreak.
Whether chronicling the lives of failed writers, lost souls, or recluses, his work pulses with a belief in storytelling as both salvation and trap. Brooklyn Follies follows Nathan Glass, a retired insurance man who returns to the borough seeking “a quiet place to die,” only to find himself pulled into a quirky cast of characters and unexpected family ties. Like many of Auster’s protagonists, Glass seeks refuge in the written word:
“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.”
In J. Peder Zane’s compilation The Top Ten – which also featured reading lists from literary heavyweights like Norman Mailer, Stephen King and Tom Wolfe – Auster offered a glimpse into the books that shaped him. From Don Quixote and Moby-Dick to Kafka, Proust, and Beckett, explore his selections below, and complement with the recommendations of Bret Easton Ellis, Don DeLillo, Haruki Murakami and T.C. Boyle.
Paul Auster’s Reading List
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (also rec’d by Bill Maher, David Copperfield, Jeff Tweedy & Marcus Garvey)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (also rec’d by André Leon Talley, Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Carson McCullers, Ernest Hemingway, John Cleese, Martin Luther King Jr. & Nelson Mandela)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (also rec’d by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Harold Bloom, Hugh Laurie, John Irving, Morgan Freeman, Norman Mailer, Ocean Vuong, Patti Smith, Penn Jillette, Ray Bradbury, Steve Jobs, Susan Orlean & Tilda Swinton)
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (also rec’d by Bill Hader, David Lynch, Jeremy Strong, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth & René Redzepi)
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (also rec’d by Henry Rollins & Marina Abramovic)
Ulysses by James Joyce (also rec’d by Bret Easton Ellis, Gabriel García Márquez, Irvine Welsh, Jennifer Connelly, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Morrison & Martin Amis)
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (also rec’d by Harold Bloom, John Irving & Patti Smith)
The Castle by Franz Kafka (also rec’d by Henry Rollins)
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (also rec’d by Kurt Cobain & Mike Leigh)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (also rec’d by Hugh Dancy, Jim Jarmusch & Laurie Anderson)
(via The Top Ten; photo by Christopher Thomond)
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