The New York Trilogy

City of Glass As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Ghosts Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his window. The Locked Room Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving behind his wife and baby and a cache of extraordinary novels, plays, and poems. What happened to him--and why is the narrator, Fanshawe's boyhood friend, lured obsessively into his life?

Paul Auster is the author of Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan (awarded the 1993 Prix Medicis Etranger), The Music of Chance (nominated for the 1991 Pen/Faulkner Award), Moon Palace, and In the Country of Last Things. He has also written two memoirs, The Invention of Solitude and Hand to Mouth; a collection of essays, The Art of Hunger; and a volume of poems, Disappearances. He has won literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both poetry and prose, and in 1990 received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote the screenplays for Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge, which he also directed. His work has been translated into twenty-nine languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.