The New York Trilogy
City of Glass / Ghosts / The Locked Room
by Paul Auster · first published 1987
78% recommend11% neutral11% critical
Why HN recommends it
Genre-bending detective-style novellas with a strange, melancholy tone. An accessible entry point to Auster and English-language fiction, suited to readers who enjoy Murakami-like surrealism.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
The New York Trilogy is an astonishing and original book: three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. Auster's book is modern fiction at its finest: bold, arresting and unputdownable.
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…a similar vein, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders is both lightly funny and surreal. Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami reminded me a bit of the meloncholy of Norwegian Wood. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster is also very reminiscent of Murakami.
on “Japanese Writing After Murakami” ↗Go buy a good novel. Here's some random picks for you: The road by Cormack McCarthy (a real page turner), The New York trilogy by Paul Auster, Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, The stranger by Albert Camus.
on “Ask HN: Help, I'm stuck on HN” ↗…favorites, but perfect as an intro I think. "Mr Vertigo" was my intro and I think it was a good one as well. "In the Country of Last Things" is also great, but a bit short for the story arc iirc. I read the New York trilogy relatively late but these are arguably his most well-received books and I enjoyed them a lot as well. The other books I mentioned he wrote later, if I'm not misremembering.
on “Paul Auster has died” ↗If you liked this, I highly recommend the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.
on “A guy tries to find the origins of a Windows desktop image” ↗The other two books in his New York Trilogy (Ghosts and The Locked Room) do a similar job of deconstructing the genre in different, similarly mindbending ways. As an aside, I've never seen anyone do a better job of describing the very specific…
on “The Ten Commandments for Detective Fiction (2017)” ↗As a non-native English speaker, Austers’ “The New York Trilogy” got me into reading (and enjoying) English books in high school.
on “Paul Auster on cancer, connection and the fallacy of closure” ↗In college, I read all of the New York Trilogy at a coffee shop in one sitting, and it left me bent for the rest of the day. Good times. RIP.
on “Paul Auster has died” ↗…cultural or religious figures (eg stories about Krishna). Then there are the graphicalizations (thats a word I just made up) of other works. For example, there's a graphical novel version of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. Probably not as well known to the average reader.
on “Bébé Bibliophile” ↗…read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco. Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??
on “The cultural decline of literary fiction” ↗