Will I love The New York Trilogy?

This is post-modern crime fiction thematically linked and all with increasingly unreliable characters—because they’re each going insane.

In City of Glass private investigator, Daniel Quinn, goes mad sinking deeper into an investigation about identity. Who is telling his story and can they be relied on? Is it any of these characters who appear: ‘the author,’ ‘Paul Auster the writer,’ ‘Paul Auster the detective’? Whoosh.

I love this stuff but understand it’s an acquired taste!

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy—previously published as City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—is an astonishingly original take on detective and mystery novels. Although I love reading these genres, in real life puzzles rarely get solved in such a neat and tidy fashion, which is why I find this trilogy so intriguing. Auster’s stories are paradoxical and perplexing, replete with ambiguities, enclosing the reader in a hall of mirrors. The three novels expose the absurdity of fiction, which by definition is make-believe, yet repeatedly fools us into regarding the contrived imaginings of the author… show more.

Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy—comprising of City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room—originally published in 1985-86, carved out a niche all its own, what you might call existential noir. Here, the essence of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, is given a philosophical facelift, with Auster transforming the classic detective novel into a meditation on identity and self, as reflected in a house of fractured mirrors. As someone who grew up in Brooklyn—a fan of noir in film and literature, and of works that are speculative and mind-bending—my discovery of The New York Trilogy was like… show more.

The New York Trilogy is a collection of three separate postmodern detective stories that are seemingly separate, but also strangely connected.

“City of Glass” follows a writer who becomes a private investigator and begins losing sense of his identity and reality as he becomes entrenched in a case. “Ghosts” is about a different private detective on a different case (or is it?). “The Locked Room” focuses on a writer (but have we met him before?) who is finding it more and more difficult to write anything at all.

The stories dance around a metafiction narrative and there are enough philosophical… show more.