Auster met the writer Siri Hustvedt, a blonde willow of a woman with a surprisingly strong handshake and a sharp jawline, at a poetry reading on February 23 1981, a date he preserves for posterity in Leviathan, in which the hero, Peter, meets Iris (hold a mirror up to that name) in a similar situation, and, gushingly, mistakes her for "a fashion model - an error that most people still make when seeing her for the first time".

Not quite like any other entry on this list, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is a series of novels that were first published sequentially but have since been presented in a single volume. Equally reminiscentof The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Goldfinch in terms of tone and themes explored, City on Fire chronicles the aftermath of a shooting thatoccurs in Central Park on New Year's Eve in the 1970s, bringing readers face to face with a number of very New York City-like characters while exploringsubjects likeracism and violence thatunfortunately still plague town today. The1943 semi-autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyntakes place in the Williamsburg of days yore, before world-renowned restaurants and super-tall skyscrapers revolutionized thearea and brought itone step closer to Manhattan.

Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA18196 Openlibrary_edition Perhaps it is this combination that has so endeared him to New York, a city that prides itself on its cynicism, but has a Santa Claus on every corner at Christmas. "New York is not just a place, it's an idea," he says. "It's this idea of an all-welcoming city of immigrants where everyone can be a New Yorker." Even a sentimental storyteller from New Jersey. Exhilarating. . .a brilliant investigation of the storyteller’s art guided by a writer who’s never satisfied with just the facts.”

Not many novels focus on the Chinese immigrant experience within the confines of a New York lifestyle—a fact that automatically makes Weike Wang's Joan is Okay worthy of discussion. He was doing writing commissions, like translations, for money, but this meant he didn't have time to concentrate on his poetry which caused him enormous frustration." Auster also wrote about this part of his life in The Invention of Solitude and the descriptions of his depression and loss ("He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence"), presage the lonely and dislocated characters he created a few years later, particularly Quinn in New York Trilogy and David in his latest novel, his 10th, The Book of Illusions.

The moment comes when you're formed and you can't be influenced any more," he says. Lauterbach says that, in Auster's case, this is probably true, but not always to his benefit: "The themes in Paul's books haven't changed since when I first met him more than 20 years ago: he's still looking at the nature of fate; he's still looking at how events impact on a person; he's still looking at the effect of chance." Employment: Census taker; oil tank utilityman on the Esso Florence; translator; 1997 juror, Cannes Film Festival; '86-90 tutor in storywriting and translation, Princeton University Strikingly, Auster, who almost always writes in the first person both in fiction and non-fiction, becomes in the story of his own life, "A". The distance created by slipping from first to third person reads like a quiet sigh of denial and loneliness, of someone who, he writes, was "living to the side of himself".