Paul Auster, the prolific US novelist whose works included The New York Trilogy, has died of complications from lung cancer, a friend of the novelist said.
He was 77.
Auster died on Tuesday evening at his home in Brooklyn, New York, surrounded by family, including his wife, Siri Hustvedt, and daughter Sophie Auster, his friend and fellow author Jacki Lyden said in a statement.
Photo: AFP
He made his name with noirish, existentialist novels about lonely writers, outsiders and down-and-outers that were a huge hit in Europe particularly.
The author with the soulful, sunken eyes gained cult status in the 1980s and 1990s with his New York Trilogy of metaphysical mysteries and his hip film Smoke, about the lost souls who frequent a Brooklyn tobacco shop.
Hustved, also an author, announced in March last year that he had been diagnosed with cancer.
Auster’s more than 30 books are as likely to be found in airports as on university reading lists and have been translated into more than 40 languages.
Lyden called Auster a “writer’s writer” who covered “every facet of loss, loneliness, and the joys and sorrows of a life in words.”
Auster grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants.
He moved to New York to attend Columbia University and later spent four years in France.
His big breakthrough came with The New York Trilogy, a philosophical twist on the detective genre featuring a shady quartet of private investigators named Blue, Brown, Black and White.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS