Talking to Strangers is a freshly curated collection of prose spanning fifty years of work and
including famous as well as never-before-published early writings from 2018 Man Booker
Prize-finalist Paul Auster. Beginning with a short philosophical meditation written when he was
twenty and concluding with nine political pieces that take on such issues as homelessness 9 11
and the link between soccer and war the 44 pieces gathered in this volume offer a wide-ranging
view of celebrated novelist Paul Auster's thoughts on a multitude of classic and contemporary
writers the high-wire exploits of Philippe Petit how to improve life in New York City (in
collaboration with visual artist Sophie Calle) and the long road he has traveled with his
beloved manual typewriter. While writing for the New York Review of Books and other
publications in the mid-1970s young poet Auster gained recognition as an astute literary
critic with essays on Laura Riding John Ashbery Samuel Beckett Franz Kafka Paul Celan and
others. By the late seventies and early eighties as the poet was transforming himself into a
novelist he maintained an active double life by continuing his work as a translator and
editing the groundbreaking anthology The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry. His
prefaces to some of these books are included in Talking to Strangers among them a
heart-wrenching account of Stéphane Mallarmé's response to the death of his eight-year-old son
Anatole. In recent years Auster has pushed on with explorations into the work of American
artists spanning various periods and disciplines: the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne the
films of Jim Jarmusch the writings of painter-collagist-illustrator Joe Brainard and the
three-hit shutout thrown by journeyman right-hander Terry Leach of the Mets. Also included here
are several rediscovered works that were originally delivered in public: a 1982 lecture on
Edgar Allan Poe a 1999 blast against New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and one of the funniest
introductions a poetry reading ever heard in the state of New Jersey. A collection of soaring
intelligence and deepest humanity Talking to Strangers is an essential book by the most
distinguished American writer of [his] generation . . . indeed its only author . . . with any
claim to greatness. (The Spectator)
