Book Summary and Reviews of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

by Paul Auster

  • Critics' Consensus (2):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • Published:
  • Apr 2025, 400 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his deeply beloved series, The New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction.

In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's acclaimed New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics.

Now the wait is over.

The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpration of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass, an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist's downfall. And in The Locked Room, another author is experiencing writer's block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel.

Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster's sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"This spectacular graphic adaptation of Auster's postmodern trilogy, cowritten by Paul Karasik, unites three tales of lonely men seeking meaning into a distilled portrait of the haunted urban soul." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"An engrossing marriage of literature and pulp." —Kirkus Reviews

This information about Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Author Information

Paul Auster Author Biography

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1Sunset ParkThe Book of Illusions, Moon Palace, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. His other honors include the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His most recent novel, 4 3 2 1, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He died at age 77 in his home in Brooklyn in ...

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