Today my very special guest is one of our most read, most translated, most celebrated authors, the novelist/essayist/poet/screenwriter Paul Auster, who community radio listeners will also know from his work hosting NPR’s National Story Project. Paul Auster’s newest book is Man in the Dark, arguably his most accessible novel, most clearly, carefully commenting on our political moment, and yet another tour of what some reviewers have called "Austerland," a place of difficult imagination, tricky narratives, labyrinthine stories within stories. It's always impossible not to keep going with Auster down and through and inside whatever story we are reading. Man in the Dark finds him using his trademark storytelling of multiple identities and the puzzles of language to complicate and unravel a life. “I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.” So promises Auster’s protagonist, the bedridden retired book critic who occupies, frightens, redeems himself with the tale of a parallel fictional America in an effort to come to terms with the loss and violence of his own life and what passes for the real America. Brave, inventive, nightmarish and revelatory, more fiction by Paul Auster couldn’t arrive at a better time. Note: Please contribute online today to KPFK's Summer Sign-Up membership drive. http://www.kpfk.org/
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