The New York Trilogy : City Of Glass; Ghosts; The Locked Room

First published in 1985�1986, _The New York Trilogy ( City of Glass, Ghosts_, and The Locked Room ) brought immediate international attention to its author, Paul Auster, and elevated him to near-celebrity status, particularly in France. This trilogy and his many works since then (including In the Country of Last Words , Leviathan , Mr. Vertigo , Moon Palace , and others) have been translated into numerous languages and have brought him further world attention. Auster�s trilogy broke ground in its mix of serious fictional techniques and detective and mystery genres. Geoffrey O�Brien of _The Village Voice wrote: " The New York Trilogy _are novels of desire: the desire to write a detective novel, to read one, to -inhabit it. . . . By turning the mystery novel inside out, Auster may have -initiated a whole new round of storytelling." This new edition will delight readers and collectors of Auster�s work. 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. Luc Sante is best known for his first book, Low Life . He has also written introductions to books by Georges Simenon, Jacob Riis, and many other authors. Art Spiegelman is a cartoonist who first came to attention in the early 1980s with a magazine he edited called Raw. Maus , his graphic novel about the Holocaust, won him the Pulitzer Prize, and his most recent book is In the Shadow of No Towers . 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. The New York Trilogy is an astonishing and original book: three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. Auster's book is modern fiction at its finest: bold, arresting and unputdownable. IT was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.