Weissman School of Arts and Sciences

Paul Auster

photo of Paul Auster

 

Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence, Spring 2002

 

Photo: Sigrid Estrada

“For one whole year he did nothing but drive, traveling back and forth across America as he waited for the money to run out. He hadn't expected it to go on that long, but one thing kept leading to another, and by the time Nashe understood what was happening to him, he was past the point of wanting it to end. Three days into the thirteenth month, he met up with the kid who called himself Jackpot. It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to materialize out of thin air-a twig that breaks off in the wind and suddenly lands at your feet. Had it occurred at any other moment, it is doubtful that Nashe would have opened his mouth. But because he had already given up, he figured there was nothing to lose anymore, he saw the stranger as a reprieve, as a last chance to do something for himself before it was too late. And just like that, he went ahead and did it. Without the slightest tremor of fear, Nashe closed his eyes and jumped.”

-From The Music of Chance

Paul Auster, the prominent writer, is the Spring 2002 Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch. Mr. Auster is the author of Timbuktu (1999), Leviathan (1992), The Music of Chance (1990), Moon Palace (1989), In the Country of Last Things (1987), and the three novels known as “The New York Trilogy”: City of Glass (1986), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1987). He has also written two memoirs, The Invention of Solitude (1982) and Hand to Mouth (1997), and a book of critical essays, The Art of Hunger (1992). Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988) offers a large sampling from the various books of poetry he published in the 1970s. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie Smoke (1995), was co-director (with Wayne Wang) of Blue in the Face (1995), and wrote and directed the film Lulu on the Bridge (1998). He edited The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry (1982) and produced numerous translations of French writers and poets, including Jacques Dupin, André du Bouchet, Joseph Joubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, Phillippe Petit, Maurice Blanchot, and Pierre Clastres. In 1996, some of this work was published in a collection entitled Translations. Most recently, Mr. Auster edited I Thought My Father was God and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project.

Mr. Auster has received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990), the Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay (1996), and the Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel published in France (1992). His work has been translated into 27 languages.

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