The Red Notebook - Softcover

Paul Auster is the best-selling author of Invisible, Moon Palace, Mr Vertigo, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Medicis Etranger for Leviathan. He has also been short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The arresting stories in this slim collection by Auster (The New York Trilogy, etc.) go a long way toward answering the perennial question "Why write?" The book contains four short narratives: "The Red Notebook," "It Don't Mean a Thing," "Accident Report" and "Why Write?" All the tales and vignettes, hovering somewhere between fact and fiction, feature amazing little coincidences or linkages. In one brief chapter, Auster (as protagonist) loses a dime in a gutter in Brooklyn only to look down and find a dime later the same day. In another, he checks into a hotel room in an obscure hotel in Paris and finds a crumpled message from the desk to a close friend the previous occupant of the room. The most affecting stories, however, recount a more ineffable sense of connection: Auster makes it to the foot of a staircase to catch his little daughter just in time to keep her from sailing through a window; as a boy at summer camp, he is on a group hike when the boy next to him is struck by lightning and killed. What all the stories have in common is not a fixed outcome or meaning but a sense of the patterned meaningfulness of life. Readers will glimpse here how the act of witnessing itself provides the punch line. As Auster learned the hard way when he met Willie Mays one day and didn't have a pencil to get an autograph, the sense of wonder burgeons when we can record its source on paper.
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