As our title indicates, Today is Paul Auster's birthday, specifically 70 years. The writer born in Newark, New Jersey state (USA), has a broad and consolidated literary baggage, plus film, since he is also a film director and screenwriter.
He is a fairly complete writer, and if you like labyrinthine and intriguing stories, mainly from Novelty, you will love to read it. It is one of the best of this genre that we can currently find in the literary market. And if not, here we summarize all the awards and decorations it has received over the years:
- Morton Dauwen Zabel Award 1990 (American Academy of Arts and Letters).
- Medici Award 1993 (France) for the best novel by a foreign author for his novel «Leviathan".
- Independent Spirit Award 1995 for the best original screenplay for his film «Smoke ».
- Archbishop Juan de San Clemente Literary Award 2000 by «Timbuktu ».
- Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (France, 1992).
- Madrid Booksellers Guild Award 2003 to the best book of the year for «The book of illusions ».
- Award What to read 2005 awarded by the readers of this magazine for «The night of the oracle ».
- Prince of Asturias Award for Literature 2006 year.
- Lethe Prize 2009 (Leon).
- Doctorate Honoris Causa from the National University of General San Martín 2014.
Recommended works by Paul Auster
You can read almost everything about Paul Auster, which you will surely like, but if you have not read anything of his yet, we give you these 5 recommendations:
"The palace of the moon" (Currently discontinued)
Marco Stanley Fogg is on the verge of manhood when astronauts set foot on the moon. The son of an unknown father, he was educated by the eccentric Uncle Victor, who played the clarinet in seedy orchestras. At the dawn of the lunar era, after his uncle died, Marco progressively fell into destitution, loneliness and a kind of quiet insanity of nuances 'Dostoevskians', until the beautiful Kitty Wu rescues him. Marco then begins to work for an old paralyzed painter and writes his biography, which he wants to bequeath to his son, whom he never met. After a long journey that takes him to the West and under the influence of the omnipresent moon, Marco will discover the mysteries of his origin and the identity of his father.
"The Book of Illusions"
David Zimmer, a writer and professor of literature from Vermont, is no longer a shadow of himself. He spends his days drinking and brooding over the last moment in which his life could still have changed, the moment when his wife and children had not yet boarded the plane that exploded. Until one night, watching almost without watching television, and for the first time after six months of wandering in the void, something makes him laugh. The cause of the tiny miracle is Hector Mann, one of the last silent film comedians. And David Zimmer discovers that he hasn't hit rock bottom yet, that he still wants to live. He will then begin his research to write a book about Mann, a young, brilliant, enigmatic comedian born in Argentina, one of whose latest films, Nobody, tells the story of a man whom a perfidious friend convinces to drink a potion that makes it disappear.
"Brooklyn Follies"
Nathan Glass has survived lung cancer and divorce after three decades of marriage, and has returned to Brooklyn, the place where he spent his childhood. Until he got sick he was an insurance salesman; Now that he no longer has to earn a living, he plans to write The Book of Human Delirium. He will tell everything that happens around him, everything that happens to him and what occurs to him. He begins to frequent the neighborhood bar and is almost in love with the waitress. And he also goes to the second-hand bookstore of Harry Brightman, a cultured homosexual who is not who he says he is. And there he meets Tom, his nephew, the son of his beloved dead sister. The young man had been a brilliant college student. And now, lonely, he drives a taxi and helps Brightman sort his books ... Little by little, Nathan will discover that he has not come to Brooklyn to die, but to live.
"The New York Trilogy"
It begins City of Glass, with a crime novel writer who, by chance, is seen acting as a detective through the streets of the city of skyscrapers while questioning who he really is. In Ghosts, a maze of searches is formed that Azul, the detective, must unravel. In The Closed Room, the protagonist is commissioned to search for a missing childhood friend who has left a suitcase full of unpublished manuscripts that he wished published, for somewhat confusing reasons. In Paul Auster's works, events unfold. they rush after events of an apparently insignificant nature: the small makes the difference and chance conditions the decisions. The investigation of the other becomes the search for oneself, in the desire to find one's own and distinctive identity.
"Winter Diary"
Paul Auster, "one of the greatest writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle), here turns his gaze on himself. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, his first prose book, Auster starts from the arrival of the first signs of old age to evoke episodes in his life: the awakening of sexual desire, the bonds of marriage, a car accident, the death of his mother or the 21 houses in which he has lived.
There are only 5 recommendations of the many that we could continue to make: "Leviathan", "Invisible", "A man in the dark", "The red notebook", and so on.