Alan Rafferty
Accident-Prone Author
Oracle Night
By Paul Auster
Faber & Faber 243pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
Collected Prose: Autobiographical Writings, True Stories, Critical Essays, Prefaces and Collaborations with Artists
By Paul Auster
Faber & Faber 512pp £25 order from our bookshop
IN 1999 PAUL Auster instigated the National Story Project in America. The idea was that people would submit anecdotes and other factual accounts which ‘defied our expectations about the world … in other words, true stories that sounded like fiction’. There were over four thousand entries, and the resulting radio shows and book constitute a remarkable archive of what Auster called ‘reports from the front lines of personal experience’. However, the project also served as an investigation into one of the quandaries at the centre of Auster’s work: what makes a story true?
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'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2
'To me, Elmore Leonard is as comforting in extremity as Pym, and as safe, in the last resort, as Wodehouse. The guys with the best lines are going to come out the other side; the dumb fucks are going to get it in the head or chest.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-spoonful-of-elmore