The Red Notebook
brings together in one volume all of Paul Auster's short, true-life stories—a remarkable collection of tales that documents the curious, miraculous, and sometimes catastrophic turns of everyday reality.
Paul Auster has earned international praise for the imaginative power of his many novels, including
The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo
, and
Timbuktu
. He has also published a number of highly original non-fiction works:
The Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth, and The Art of Hunger
. In
, Auster again explores events from the real world large and small, tragic and comic—that reveal the unpredictable, shifting nature of human experience. A burnt onion pie, a wrong number, a young boy struck by lightning, a man falling off a roof, a scrap of paper discovered in a Paris hotel room—all these form the context for a singular kind of
ars poetica
, a literary manifesto without theory, cast in the irreducible forms of pure story telling.