Death of Paul Auster
Paul Benjamin Auster (3 February 1947 – 30 April 2024) was an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His most recent book was Baumgartner [2024]. His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir titled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely connected stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. Although these books nod to the detective genre, they are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential questions of identity, space, language, and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process.
On March 11, 2023, Auster’s wife Siri Hustvedt revealed on Instagram that he had been diagnosed with cancer in December 2022, and that he had been treated at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York since then.
Paul Auster died of complications of lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn, on 30 April 2024, at the age of 77.
Baumgartner has been reviewed by QRC. Click here to read the review.
Photo credit: Lotte Hansen