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The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room (Contemporary American Fiction)

by Paul Auster

The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room (Contemporary American Fiction) Cover

Staff Pick

Amazing psychological twists will keep you guessing and leave you spellbound as you wind your way through these three stories. It's not a new release but worth discovering if you haven't already.
Recommended by michelle, Powells.com

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Paul Auster's brilliant debut novels, City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, are here collected in a cloth edition for the first time in the United States. These three novels brought Auster international acclaim for his creation of a new genre, mixing elements of the standard detective fiction and postmodern fiction.

City of Glass combines dark, Kafka-like humor with all the suspense of a Hitchcock film as a writer of detective stories becomes embroiled in a complex and puzzling series of events, beginning with a call from a stranger in the middle of the night asking for the author — Paul Auster — himself.

Ghosts, the second volume of this interconnected trilogy, introduces Blue, a private detective hired to watch a man named Black, who, as he becomes intermeshed into a haunting and claustrophobic game of hide-and-seek, is lured into the very trap he has created.

The final volume, The Locked Room, also begins with a mystery, told this time in the first-person narrative. The nameless hero journeys into the unknown as he attempts to reconstruct the past which he has experienced almost as a dream.

Together these three fictions lead the reader on adventures that expand the mind as they entertain.

Review:

"Three exhilarating installments...a brilliant investigation of the storyteller's art guided by a writer-detective who's never satisfied with just the facts." Philadelphia Inquirer

Review:

"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 the self." New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Eminently readable and mysterious....Auster has added some new dimensions to modern literature and — more importantly even — to our perspectives on the planet." Boston Globe

About the Author

Paul Auster's novels include Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, and In the Country of Last Things, as well as two memoirs, a collection of essays, a volume of poems, and the screenplays for several films. His work has been translated into over 30 languages.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
DNAMan, March 29, 2007 (view all comments by DNAMan)
A riveting set of novellas but dificult to extract the individual and/or collective lessons for living in today's complex world, or just living, in general.
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(6 of 12 readers found this comment helpful)

Product Details

ISBN:
9780140131550
Subtitle:
City of Glass/Ghosts/The Locked Room
Author:
Auster, Paul
Publisher:
Penguin Books
Location:
New York, N.Y., U.S.A :
Subject:
Fiction
Subject:
City and town life
Subject:
Short Stories (single author)
Subject:
Short stories
Subject:
Mystery fiction
Subject:
New York
Subject:
New York (N.Y.) Social life and customs Fiction.
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
New York (N.Y.) Social life and customs.
Subject:
City and town life - New York (State) -
Copyright:
Series:
Contemporary American Fiction
Series Volume:
#2-87
Publication Date:
April 1990
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Y
Pages:
371
Dimensions:
7.77x5.05x.75 in. .57 lbs.

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