cosa_pa ver Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey,[2] to Jewish middle class parents of Poli sh descent, Queenie

(ne Bogat) and Samuel Auster.[3] He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey [4] and Newark[5] and graduated from Columbia High School in Maplewoo d.[6] After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, Fran ce where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to th e U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, and novels of his own, as well a s translations of French writers such as Stphane Mallarm and Joseph Joubert. He and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (the daughter of professor and scho lar Lloyd Hustvedt), were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn.[2] Togethe r they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the w riter Lydia Davis. They have one son together, Daniel Auster. He is also the vice-president of PEN American Center. In 2012, Auster was quoted as saying in an interview that he wouldn't visit Turk ey to protest their treatment of journalists. The Turkish Prime-Minister Recep T ayyip Erdogan replied: "As if we need you! Who cares if you come or not?".[7] "A ccording to the latest numbers gathered by International PEN, there are nearly o ne hundred writers imprisoned in Turkey, not to speak of independent publishers such as Ragip Zarakolu, whose case is being closely watched by PEN Centers aroun d the world", responded Auster.[8] As of November 2010, Auster has been at work on a new novel, but has said that i n the past few years he has found it harder to come up with ideas: "I used to ha ve a backlog of stories, but a few years ago I found the drawers were empty. I g uess I m getting to the point where I tell myself if I can t write another book it s n ot a tragedy. Does it matter if I publish 16 or 17 novels? Unless it s absolutely urgent, there s no point in writing."[9] Writing[edit]

Auster greeting Israeli President Shimon Peres with Salman Rushdie and Caro Llew ellyn in 2008 Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great de al more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy g rows directly out of The Invention of Solitude."[10] The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later public ations, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between people a nd their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's he roes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films S moke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium, have also met critic al acclaim. Themes[edit] According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, t wo central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysi s and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle nineteenth century, exemplified by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the wo

rld through our senses, but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our m ind through language. Thus our unconscious also is structured as a language. Thi s leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through lang uage, but we have the feeling that something is missing. This is the sense of be ing outside language. The world can only be constructed through language, but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be told or be thought of, it may only be sensed. This is one of the central themes of Paul Auster's wr iting. Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. So me academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Miche l de Certeau - although Auster has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable '.[11] The transcendentalists believe that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - as Thoreau did in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order. The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for hu man beings.[12] Auster's protagonists often are writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing and they try to find their place within the natural order, to be able to live within "civilization" again. Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong infl uence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Auster's wor k (such as William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy), Auster also uses variations on the theme s of these writers. Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:[13] coincidence