Paul Auster Books in Order

This early collection gathers poems and prose from Auster's small-press years. It shows him working through voice, silence, the body, and space before the novels made him widely known.

Auster reflects on writing, translation, and the artists who mattered to him, from Kafka and Beckett to Celan and Hamsun. The essays are clear, searching, and full of clues to how his fiction thinks.

Edited and translated by Auster, this selection introduces Joseph Joubert through brief notebook entries and aphorisms. It is a book of fragments that rewards slow reading and careful attention.

Detective novelist Daniel Quinn answers a wrong number and steps into a case meant for someone else. What begins as surveillance in New York slowly becomes a breakdown of identity, authorship, and reality itself.

Written after his father's death, this memoir is both a family portrait and a meditation on memory and writing. It is intimate, searching, and one of the clearest guides to the concerns that shaped Auster's later work.

Blue is hired by White to watch a man named Black, and the job seems almost empty at first. The longer the stakeout goes on, the stranger and more intimate it becomes.

An unnamed narrator is asked to deal with the manuscripts left behind by his vanished childhood friend, Fanshawe. The task turns into an obsession with absence, authorship, and the dangerous pull of another man's life.

Anna Blume enters a ruined unnamed city to look for her missing brother and ends up scavenging to stay alive. This bleak, gripping dystopian novel turns survival itself into the central mystery.

Orphaned Marco Stanley Fogg drifts through New York and out toward the American West in search of family, love, and the truth about his past. It is a quest novel full of hunger, luck, and reinvention.

A writer desperate for a Christmas story gets one from Auggie Wren, the cigar-store philosopher who swears every word is true. It is warm, sly, and quietly interested in the line between honesty and invention.

Spun off from Smoke, this screenplay captures a loose, improvised Brooklyn comedy built around Auggie Wren's cigar shop. The pleasure is in the neighborhood voices, offbeat cameos, and everyday street-corner energy.

Jim Nashe and young gambler Jack Pozzi take a reckless chance in a poker game with two rich eccentrics and lose more than money. What follows is a tight, unnerving novel about debt, freedom, and absurd punishment.

When Benjamin Sachs blows himself up by the side of a road, his friend Peter Aaron tries to tell the story before others do it for him. The result is a tense novel about friendship, betrayal, and violence entering ordinary life.

This small collection gathers brief true stories and essays built from coincidences, accidents, and inexplicable turns. It feels like a pocket map of the strange events that kept feeding Auster's imagination.

Street kid Walter Rawley is taken in by the mysterious Master Yehudi, who promises to teach him how to fly. What follows is a strange American tall tale about showmanship, suffering, and the cost of wonder.

This screenplay brings together a Brooklyn novelist, cigar-store owner Auggie Wren, and a troubled teenager whose lives cross by chance. Warm, melancholy, and sharply observed, it is one of Auster's clearest stories about accident and connection.

In this short autobiographical piece, Auster circles the question of why he became a writer at all. Childhood memory, family anecdote, and the pull of language come together in a compact statement of vocation.

Auster looks back on his early years as a broke writer, moving from odd job to odd job while refusing to give up. It is funny, anxious, and very good on the daily grind behind literary ambition.

This compact literary portrait traces the links between Auster and New York, moving through streets, neighborhoods, books, and film locations. It is a useful companion for readers who want to see how the city shaped the work.

This volume gathers Auster's translations and edited selections from French writers such as Joseph Joubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, and André du Bouchet. It shows the side of his career built on close reading, precision, and literary exchange.

A slim, unusual Auster volume that moves through dreams, hotel rooms, and fleeting perceptions in brief prose pieces. It has the feel of notes caught in motion, where memory and invention keep blurring together.

Jazz musician Izzy Maurer survives a shooting and is drawn into a strange love story shaped by a glowing stone and a run of uncanny events. This screenplay blends romance, mystery, and Auster's usual questions about fate.

This collaborative volume brings Sophie Calle's art into conversation with Auster's fiction, especially the character in Leviathan inspired by her. It becomes a playful, unsettling exchange about performance, identity, and the blur between fact and invention.

Told largely through the eyes of Mr. Bones, a dog devoted to the wandering poet Willy G. Christmas, this novel is funny, sad, and deeply tender. It asks what loyalty means when the person you love is slipping away.

Writer Martin Frost retreats to a country house and wakes to find a mysterious young woman in his bed. Their intense affair turns into a quiet, eerie story about imagination, desire, and the cost of creation.

After losing his wife and sons, professor David Zimmer becomes obsessed with the vanished silent-film comedian Hector Mann. That obsession draws him into a shadowy story of grief, cinema, secrecy, and second chances.

In this short collaboration with artist Sam Messer, Auster tells the story of his beloved manual Olympia typewriter. It becomes a funny, affectionate meditation on tools, routine, and the stubborn material side of writing.

This large nonfiction collection brings together essays, prefaces, autobiographical pieces, collaborations, and interviews from across Auster's career. It ranges widely, but the recurring subjects are art, chance, New York, and the writing life.

Recovering writer Sidney Orr buys a blue notebook and begins a story that seems to spill into his own life. Over nine unsettling days, chance events and buried fears start to threaten his marriage and sense of reality.

Nathan Glass comes to Brooklyn expecting to die quietly, but family, friendship, and one eccentric bookstore pull him back into life. It is one of Auster's warmest novels, full of mess, luck, and human rescue.

An old man wakes in a locked room with no clear memory of who he is or why he is there. As manuscripts, photographs, and visitors pile up, the novel becomes a tense puzzle about guilt, identity, and captivity.

Insomniac August Brill lies awake inventing a parallel America at war with itself while grief closes in around his family. It is a small, dark novel about storytelling, violence, and the fragile comforts of home.

In 1967, student and aspiring poet Adam Walker meets a strange French couple, and one violent moment changes the course of his life. Told by several voices across decades and continents, it is sharp, restless, and morally charged.

This volume gathers Auster's film scripts, bringing together the screenplays for Smoke, Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge. It is the best place to see how his literary obsessions changed shape on screen.

Miles Heller returns to New York during the 2008 economic collapse and ends up among squatters in a house in Sunset Park. The novel threads together guilt, family strain, and the precarious lives of people trying to start over.

Drawn from letters exchanged between Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, this book turns friendship into a searching conversation. They range across politics, sport, fatherhood, art, and the strange business of being alive in their time.

Auster writes a history of his body, moving through pain, pleasure, aging, memory, and his mother's death. The second-person voice gives the memoir an unusual intimacy and a quietly haunted rhythm.

This memoir turns inward to trace Auster's early consciousness, from childhood wonder to political awakening. Movies, baseball, first poems, and family scenes all help map the making of a mind.

Archie Ferguson lives four different versions of one life, each shaped by small turns of chance. Ambitious and surprisingly intimate, the novel uses those parallel paths to ask what makes a self.

Drawn from long conversations with I. B. Siegumfeldt, this book lets Auster talk through his novels, methods, obsessions, and biography. It is one of the clearest windows into how he thought about writing.

This wide-ranging nonfiction collection moves from literary essays to political pieces, with stops in New York streets, film, art, and sport. It shows Auster as a curious, personal, and often argumentative essayist.

Auster's self-curated nonfiction gathers autobiographical writings from 1979 to 2012, including work from The Invention of Solitude, Winter Journal, and Report from the Interior. Together they trace how he kept turning memory into form.

This large-scale biography follows Stephen Crane's brief, intense life through journalism, fiction, scandal, war, and illness. Auster writes it with the urgency of one working writer trying to understand another.

Created with Spencer Ostrander and the Nichols and Chambers family, this documentary-style book follows the grief and aftermath after Tyler Kobe Nichols's murder. It is intimate, raw, and rooted in memory, photographs, and community response.

Sy Baumgartner, a seventy-one-year-old philosophy professor, is still living in the shadow of his wife Anna's death. The novel moves through grief, memory, marriage, and aging with unusual warmth and clarity.

Part essay, part visual record, this collaboration with photographer Spencer Ostrander confronts the long history of gun violence in the United States. Auster mixes personal memory, public grief, and hard questions about the country.