Paul Auster b. 1947 is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has involved scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. The steadily rising arc of his large readership has made him something of a popular culture figure with many appearances in print interviews, as well as on television, the radio, and the internet. Auster's best known novel may be his first, City of Glass 1985, a grim and intellectually puzzling mystery that belies its surface image as a detective novel and goes on to become a profound meditation on transience and mortality, the inadequacies of language, and the isolation of one person from another. Eleven more novels have followed since then, including The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions, and The Brooklyn Follies . He has, in the words of one critic, given the phrase 'experimental fiction' a good name by fashioning bona fide