Travels In The Scriptorium
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Day/Night
For the first time in one volume, two existential classics by internationally bestselling novelist Paul Auster. Day/Night brings together two metaphysical novels that mirror each other and are meant to be read in tandem: two men, each confined to a room, one suddenly alert to his existence, the other desperate to escape into sleep. In Travels in the Scriptorium, elderly Mr. Blank wakes in an unfamiliar cell, with no memory of who he is or how he got there. He must use the few objects he finds and the information imparted by the day's string of visitors to cobble together an idea of his identity. In Man in the Dark, another old man, August Brill, suffering from insomnia, struggles to push away thoughts of painful personal losses by imagining what might have been. Who are we? What is real and not real? How does the political intersect with the personal? After great loss, why are some of us unable to go on? "One of America's greats" (Time Out – Chicago) and "a descendant of Kafka and Borges," (Booklist) Auster explores in these two small masterpieces some of our most pressing philosophical concerns.
The Book of Illusions
Auster's tale of obsession from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' ( Guardian) The Book of Illusions, written with breath-taking urgency and precision, plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, and the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh . . . Mann was a comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. 'A nearly flawless work . . . Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time.' San Francisco Chronicle 'Auster's elegant, finely calibrated The Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship.' TheNew York Times