"Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter journal ... novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world ... From his baby's-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American...

"The life of Baumgartner--phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor--has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now pushing 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Baumgartner and Anna meet as young...

Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and puzzling events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife...

Written with breathtaking urgency and precision, this stunnng novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another.

New York native Miles Heller now cleans out foreclosed south Florida homes, but after falling in love with an underage girl and stirring the wrath of her older sister, he flees to Brooklyn and shacks up with a group of artists squatting in the borough's Sunset Park neighborhood. As Miles arrives at the squat, the narrative broadens to take in the lives of Miles's roommates--among them Bing, "the champion of discontent," and Alice, a starving writer--and...

Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget--his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this...

Presents three short novels of mystery and suspense that combine elements of standard detective fiction and postmodern fiction.

A friendship between a man and a dog, told from the dog's point of view. The dog understands English and he knows his alcoholic master is a little crazy, but he is a tolerant sort. When the master dies the dog sets out to find a new one

A collection of 180 personal, true-life accounts from NPR's National Story Project reflects the work of men and women of all ages, backgrounds, and walks of life and is accompanied by a look at the role of storytelling in our lives.