Remembering Paul Auster

When I was an 18-year-old community college student (De Anza College in Cupertino, California, down the street from the Apple headquarters), not really sure what I wanted to do with my life, I took a "Contemporary Literature" class.

The professor, Barbara Loren, assigned us a 25-page term paper as our quarter-long project. The assignment: read five books from a living author, and analyze them.

Across the street from De Anza was a fantastic bookstore: A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, in what was then the Oaks Shopping Center. I loved this bookstore, and after class, I traipsed over there and began my search for a living author who had written five books I could use for this monster paper.

It didn't take me very long—I started in the A's—and came across a guy with a name remarkably similar to my own. I picked up The New York Trilogy. (This was late 1990, when Auster only had six novels published.) The first line of the first book in the trilogy, City of Glass, completely captivated me:

I burned through those six books and wrote my essay on the themes of solitude and the overlapping of names (shout out to Jacques Derrida and the signifier/signified arguments). And I was VERY excitered two years later whenRead More