"The Worst Possibilities of the Imagination are the Country You Live In": Paul Auster in the Twenty-First Century

"The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster" is a collection of essays on Auster's recent novels and films. Following the example of "Beyond the Red Notebook" (1995), Stefania Ciocia and Jesus A. Gonzalez have assembled an international group of scholars to provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's twenty-first-century output and draw connections between the author's early and later production. Adopting various (inter)disciplinary approaches, the contributors - Michelle Banks, Alan Bilton, Mark Brown, Stefania Ciocia, Anita Durkin, Ginevra Geraci, Jesus A. Gonzalez, Francois Hugonnier, Ulrich Meurer, James Peacock, Paolo Simonetti, and Aliki Varvogli - contextualize Auster's position not only in the American canon, but also on the global artistic scene. This volume invites us to take another look at Auster as an inventor of illusions in the most positive sense of the word: not as short-lived, deceitful gimmickry, but rather as an imaginative testing of possibilities, a wilful establishment of real bonds between people, even when these bonds are rooted in the world of storytelling. "The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster" will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary literature as well as the general reader willing to learn more about Paul Auster's world.