Synopses & Reviews
In this astonishingly acrobatic collection, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature or art through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Knut Hamsun, and other seminal figures of our century.
In a section of interviews, as well as in The Red Notebook, Auster reflects on his own work on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing, and on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity.
The Art of Hunger undermines and illuminates our accepted notions about literature and throws an unprecedented light on Auster's own richly allusive writings.
Review
"The only American writer under fifty with any claim to greatness." Tatler
Review
"A beautiful, furious erudition....a well-led tour through the landscape of a sensibility." St Louis Post-Dispatch
Review
"The Art of Hunger shows that literature begins and ends outside literature, as something one does to live." Chicago Tribune