Paul Auster: Park Slope's Master of Chance and Coincidence

Paul Auster Photo Credit: Getty Images

A note from our founder

Our third tribute brings us into more recent memory. Paul Auster passed away only in 2024, and for decades before that, he was as much a fixture of Park Slope as any brownstone on the block. Few writers have made Brooklyn feel like a character in its own right the way he did.

From Newark to the Left Bank to Brooklyn

Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947, in Newark, New Jersey. He studied at Columbia University, then spent several formative years living a fairly bohemian life in France, supporting himself as a translator of French poetry and, at one point, as a merchant seaman. That restless, itinerant period would echo throughout his later fiction, which returned again and again to chance encounters, wandering protagonists, and lives that pivot on a single random event.

Eventually, Auster settled in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he lived and wrote for decades. Over that time, his name became almost synonymous with the neighborhood, and Brooklyn's reputation as a literary capital owes no small part to his presence there.

The Breakthrough

Auster's defining work arrived in 1987 with The New York Trilogy, three interconnected novellas — City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room — that borrowed the shape of detective fiction only to dissolve it from the inside, using the genre's conventions to probe questions of identity, language, and coincidence instead of solving crimes. It's the book most readers point to first, and it set the template for a career built on stories within stories and protagonists caught in webs of chance.

A Career Beyond the Novel

Auster was never only a novelist. He wrote essays, memoirs, and translations, and he moved into film as well, writing the screenplay for Smoke (1995), the beloved indie film set around a Brooklyn cigar shop. His contributions to literature and culture earned him membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2007, France named him Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of the country's highest honors for artists.

He was married to the writer Siri Hustvedt, herself a major literary voice, and the two were long regarded as one of American literature's great couples. Auster died on April 30, 2024, at his home in Brooklyn, from complications of lung cancer.

Selected Bibliography

Fiction

• The New York Trilogy (1987) — Auster's defining work, three interlocking novellas in which detective-story conventions give way to existential puzzles.

  
  

• In the Country of Last Things (1987) — An epistolary, post-apocalyptic novel following a young woman searching for her brother in a collapsing, unnamed city.

  
  

• Moon Palace (1989) — A sprawling picaresque tracing a destitute Columbia student through the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s.

  
  

• The Music of Chance (1990) — A spare, unsettling fable about a drifter and a gambler forced into building a pointless stone wall after a ruinous poker game.

  
  

• Leviathan (1992) — A literary mystery centered on a writer trying to understand why his closest friend detonated a bomb on a remote highway.

  
  

• The Book of Illusions (2002) — A grieving professor becomes fixated on the vanished archive of a silent-film comedian who disappeared in 1929.

  
  

• The Brooklyn Follies (2005) — A warm portrait of Park Slope life, following a lung cancer survivor and his nephew as they set out to write a book about human folly.

  
  

• 4 3 2 1 (2017) — A sprawling, nearly 900-page novel tracing four different versions of one boy's life, built around how small choices and chance reshape a destiny.

  
  

• Baumgartner (2023) — Auster's final novel, a quiet meditation on aging, grief, and memory told through a widowed philosophy professor.

Memoir & Non-Fiction

• The Invention of Solitude (1982) — His debut memoir, written after his father's sudden death, on isolation, family, and how memory works.

  
  

• Winter Journal (2012) — An unconventional, second-person autobiography reflecting on aging and physical vulnerability.

READ AUSTER

Start with The New York Trilogy if you want the book that made his name, or The Brooklyn Follies if you'd rather begin in the neighborhood he called home. Either one is a fitting introduction to a writer who found endless variations on the same central question: how much of a life is choice, and how much is chance. Get the book.

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