 First edition | |
| Author | Paul Auster |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Henry Holt and Co. |
Publication date | November 9, 2010 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 320 pp (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | 978-0-8050-9286-8 |
| Preceded by | Invisible |
| Followed by | 4 3 2 1 |
Sunset Park is a novel by Paul Auster published in November 2010.
Set during the American financial recession in 2008, the college dropout Miles Heller, who has been running from his past for seven years, is forced to leave his new girlfriend in Florida and return home to New York City. There he unites with his old friend Bing who lives with two women in an abandoned home in the Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Through several situations of coincidence and self-discovery, it is a story about how to reconnect with a world once left behind, and how to rejoin the human race after self-inflicted exile.
The novel was well-regarded upon publication. In The New York Times Book Review, novelist Malena Watrous wrote, "[Auster is] right that the rules of fiction should be bent. Writers not always determined to please the reader are the ones who break new ground. Auster’s renegade impulse has set him apart, earning him devoted fans. He has also been taken to task for following his own formula too often. In 'Sunset Park,' he deviates from it by telling a fairly linear story, although there are still lengthy passages in which he interrupts the narrative by pasting in baseball trivia, a treatise on behalf of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and quotations from the classic movie 'The Best Years of Our Lives.' Yet if Auster can’t escape his own fixations — if his characters still mourn the passing moment even as they live in it, still yearn to hold on to the present even as it slips away — maybe that’s because this nostalgia is one universal human desire, made manifest in every photograph and every novel and every effort to leave a mark." [1]
Paul Benjamin Auster is an American writer and film director. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than forty languages.
The Human Stain (2000) is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. It is narrated by 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain. Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Moon Palace is a novel written by Paul Auster that was first published in 1989.
Ralph Albert Blakelock was a romanticist American painter known primarily for his landscape paintings related to the Tonalism movement.
Smoke is a 1995 American independent film by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster. The original story was written by Paul Auster, who also wrote the screenplay. The film was produced by Greg Johnson, Peter Newman, Kenzo Horikoshi, and Hisami Kuroiwa. Among others, it features Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Stockard Channing, Harold Perrineau Jr., and Forest Whitaker.
Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1964 novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr. The novel takes a harsh, uncompromising look at lower class Brooklyn in the 1950s written in a brusque, everyman style of prose.
The Book of Illusions is a novel by American writer Paul Auster, published in 2002. It was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2004.
Jim Knipfel is an American novelist, autobiographer, and journalist.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft in two and a half days, without sleeping much, but also that he was quite a serious student of Holocaust-related literature for years before the idea for the novel even came to him. The book has received mixed reviews; while positive reviews praise the story as a moral, negative reviews attack the book's historical inconsistencies, and the potential damage it could cause to people's education about the Holocaust.
Atticus Lish is an American novelist. His debut, Preparation for the Next Life, caught its independent publisher, Tyrant, “off guard” by becoming a surprise success, winning a number of awards including the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Lish lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with his wife. He is the son of influential literary editor Gordon Lish.
Robert Charles Reuland is an American novelist and attorney.
Invisible is a novel by Paul Auster published in 2009 by Henry Holt and Company. The book is divided into four parts, telling a continuous story but each section told in a different voice and by several different authors.
Malena Watrous is an American novelist, essayist, short story writer, educator, and author of numerous magazine articles.
Leslie Jamison is an American novelist and essayist. She is the author of the 2010 novel The Gin Closet and the 2014 essay collection The Empathy Exams. Jamison also directs the non-fiction concentration in writing at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
Dreams of Joy is a 2011 novel by Lisa See. It debuted as #1 in the New York Times list of best selling fiction. In this book See completes the circle she began in Shanghai Girls. The former novel ends with the suicide of Pearl's husband Sam and the shattering discovery by Joy that May is really her mother, Pearl is her aunt, and Z.G., the famous Chinese artist, is her father. Joy's guilt-driven journey to China to find her father and Pearl's loving pursuit are placed in the context of the tumult and suffering of Mao's China—especially in the context of the horrific famine caused by Mao's misguided Great Leap Forward. Frank Dikotter writes that “at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962.. . As famine spread, the very survival of an ordinary person came increasingly to depend on the ability to lie, charm, hide, steal, cheat, pilfer, forage, smuggle, trick, manipulate or otherwise outwit the state.” See's novel uses Mao's China as her background, but her story focuses on the change and growth of her main characters – Pearl, Joy, Z.G., and May. Susan Salter Reynolds suggests that “it’s a story with characters who enter a reader’s life, take up residence, and illuminate the myriad decisions and stories that make up human history.”
One Desire is a 1955 Technicolor drama romance film directed by Jerry Hopper and starring Anne Baxter, Julie Adams and Rock Hudson. Described as a "rugged story of oil-boom Oklahoma in the early 1900s", it was adapted from Conrad Richter's best-selling 1942 novel Tacey Cromwell. Baxter portrays a gambling house owner, Hudson a card dealer turned bank president and Adams the woman who comes between them. A young Natalie Wood is also in a featured role.
The Language of Flowers is the debut novel of American author Vanessa Diffenbaugh. It was published in 2011 by Ballantine Books. The novel follows the fraught life of a Victoria Jones, who by the age of 18, had lived in 32 foster homes, and becomes a flower arranger.
American Subversive is a novel by David Goodwillie published in 2010.
4 3 2 1 is a novel by Paul Auster published in January 2017. At the time of its publication, it was the first new Auster novel to have appeared in seven years. Auster worked on the book seven days a week for three years and wrote it in long hand. At 866 pages, the novel is much longer than any of his previous works. In September 2017 it was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize.
Works by Paul Auster | ||
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