Paul Auster

Paul Auster's Top Ten List

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Paul Auster (born 1947) is an American author and translator whose writing blends absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity. He has published 18 novels, including The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989),The Book of Illusions (2002) and Sunset Park (2010); three books of poems, including Collected Poems (2007); five screenplays; and eight works of essays and memoir including his first book, The Invention of Solitude (1982), Hand to Mouth (1997) and Report from the Interior (2013). He married the writer Siri Hustvedt on Bloom’s Day in 1982.

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615). Considered literature’s first great novel, Don Quixote is the comic tale of a dream-driven nobleman whose devotion to medieval romances inspires him to go in quest of chivalric glory and the love of a lady who doesn’t know him. Famed for its hilarious antics with windmills and nags, Don Quixote offers timeless meditations on heroism, imagination, and the art of writing itself. Still, the heart of the book is the relationship between the deluded knight and his proverb-spewing squire, Sancho Panza. If their misadventures illuminate human folly, it is a folly redeemed by simple love, which makes Sancho stick by his mad master “no matter how many foolish things he does.”

2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869). Mark Twain supposedly said of this masterpiece, “Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race.” Everything else is included in this epic novel that revolves around Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. Tolstoy is as adept at drawing panoramic battle scenes as he is at describing individual feeling in hundreds of characters from all strata of society, but it is his depiction of Prince Andrey, Natasha, and Pierre —who struggle with love and with finding the right way to live —that makes this book beloved.