Man in the Dark

Paul Auster reads the first chapter of his latest novel, Man in the Dark. (Running Time: 40:02)

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Man in the Dark is a brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. It focuses on seventy two year old August Brill, who is recovering from a car accident in his daughter's house in Vermont. Brill lies in bed and struggles to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget -- his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus. When sleep refuses to come, the retired book critic tells himself stories, imagining a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself, having been thrown into civil war by the 2000 presidential election. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Passionate and shocking, Man in the Dark is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

About the Author:

Paul Auster: Paul Auster has been called "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers" (The Times Literary Supplement), and his work has been translated into thirty-five languages. He is the author of Man in the Dark, Travels in the Scriptorium, The Brooklyn Follies, Oracle Night, The Book of Illusions, Timbuktu, Mr. Vertigo, Leviathan, The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, In the Country of Last Things, and the three novels known as The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. City of Glass has also been adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli into a graphic novel (Picador, 2004). His nonfiction works, collected for the first time in the Picador Paperback Original Collected Prose (March 1, 2005), include The Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth, The Red Notebook, and The Art of Hunger.