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Paul Auster
I include Paul Auster primarily for his mind trip of a detective novel, The New York Trilogy. The Trilogy, incorporating City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room, fragments the space between reality and fiction like the remnants of a shattered mirror. For example, the protagonist of City of Glass, a detective writer named Mr. Quinn, is woken late at night by a mysterious phone call. The caller, a wrong number, is trying to reach a Mr...Paul Auster. As the tale progresses, our world and Auster's world of fiction continue to overlap in intriguing, mind-bending ways, creating an imaginative and enthralling commentary on the act and power of writing.
While I greatly prefer The New York Trilogy to the other Auster books I've read, In the Country of Last Things also deserves note. It tells the story of a young woman in search of her missing brother in a post-apocalyptic nightmare of a city, where the citizens arrange suicides or assassinations to escape the hell their life has become. A dreary dystopic vision, but potent nonetheless.
Paul Auster has also ventured into the world of film. The movie Smoke, starring Harvey Keitel and William Hurt and written by Auster, is strikingly like Auster's novels. He also wrote and directed Blue in the Face, which I have not seen.
