Another chance to hear Harriett Gilbert talking to bestselling American writer Paul Auster, who died earlier this year on 30 April 2024. Paul Auster joined Harriett in 2012, with a literary festival audience and readers from around the world, to discuss his acclaimed work The New York Trilogy. In three brilliant variations on the classic detective story, Auster makes the well-traversed terrain of New York City his own. Each interconnected tale exploits the elements of standard detective fiction to achieve an entirely new genre that was ground-breaking when it was published four decades ago. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of identity and what it means to be human. Hear what readers made of Paul and his novel and what happened when another Paul Auster stood up to introduce himself to the Paul Auster on the stage – a very New York Trilogy occurrence. Presenter: Harriett Gilbert Producer: Allegra McIlroy (Photo: Paul Auster interview with Stephen Sackur in New York, 2021)
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Hello, this is the BBC World Service.
I'm Harriet Gilbert.
Welcome to World Book Club this month to commemorate one of America's most audacious writers, Paul Auster, who died this April.
Here's another chance to hear him talk with us about his book, the New York Trilogy.
It's a detective novel of sorts, or, depending on how you look at it, three interlocked detective stories in which follower and followed, chaser and pursued disturbingly merge into one another.
Paul spoke with us about it 12 years ago at the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in a marquee packed with his readers.
Paul, welcome to the World Book Club.
Thank you for having me.
And to Cheltenham, of course.
One thing worries me.
I know, or I believe that you absolutely have to write every day, and I'm just worried how you cope with that when you're traveling.
Well, the fact is I don't have to write every day because there are moments when I'm not engaged in a project, I'm not a machine, and when I finish a book I'm pretty exhausted and it might take weeks, if not months before I'm ready to start something else.
It so happens that I've recently finished something, so at the moment I haven't been writing for the last two or three weeks.