Paul Auster, at his home in Brooklyn on December 29, 2006.TIMOTHY FADEK (GETTY IMAGES)
Five essential novels by Paul Auster
New York City was a fundamental character in the work of the American writer, whose plots played with the idea of chance and spoke of love and friendship
ANDREA AGUILAR
1 May 2024
He published his first book of poems half a century ago and his first essay, The Invention of Solitude, in 1982, but it was with his novels throughout that decade and the following ones that the Paul Auster phenomenon took off. His stay in France in his youth marked his literary vision, but few authors are so deeply associated with a city, with a place as diverse and legendary as New York, as Auster was. The author, who died on Tuesday at the age of 77, devoted his work to New York — and not just his novels but also essays like the one he wrote about the poet and writer Stephen Crane, or films like Smoke. Chance, loneliness, love, melancholy, fear, madness and friendship are essential elements in Auster’s stories, in which there are nods to great works of literature and meta-literary games, but without digressing or scaring away the reader.
Barbara Kingsolver, pictured in London, when she received the Women’s Prize for Fiction for 'Demon Copperhead,' in June 2023.DAVID LEVENSON (GETTY IMAGES)
Barbara Kingsolver, writer: ‘You buy a book to take a break, not to be taught a lesson’
In ‘Demon Copperhead’ the American author builds a saga about the impoverished Appalachian region and the opioid crisis. Inspired by Charles Dickens, the book won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
She was going to be a pianist, but ended up changing course, studying biology and ecology instead. She was in her thirties when she published her first novel. And, since then, Barbara Kingsolver, 69, has published 17 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her best-known works include The Poisonwood Bible (1998) — the story about a family of American missionaries in the Congo, where she lived for several years as a child (her father worked there as a doctor) — and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (2007), about a project that she undertook with her husband and daughters. For a year, they only fed themselves with the food obtained from either their farm or their own neighborhood.
