Paul Auster

Poet, novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. Translator of French. Major themes included failure, coincidence, and identity. Many works are considered 'metafiction'. Influences included Lacan's psychoanalysis and Thoreau and Emerson's transcendentalism. His characters were often obsessive writers, had absent fathers, experienced a loss of money or language, and explored intersexuality. Volumes of poetry included Fragments From Cold, Facing the Music, and Disappearances: Selected Poems. Nonfiction included The Invention of Solitude and The Art of Hunger. Novels include City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Leviathan, Mr. Vertigo, Timbuktu, The Book of Illusions, and Oracle Night. Wrote under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin.