Author of The New York Trilogy who conjured up a world of wonder and happenstance, miracle and catastrophe

The American writer Paul Auster, who has died aged 77 from complications of lung cancer, once described the novel as “the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy”. His own 18 works of fiction, along with a shelf of poems, translations, memoirs, essays and screenplays written over 50 years, often evoke eerie states of solitude and isolation. Yet they won him not just admirers but distant friends who felt that his peculiar domain of chance and mystery, wonder and happenstance, spoke to them alone. Frequently bizarre or uncanny, the world of Auster’s work aimed to present “things as they really happen, not as they’re supposed to happen”.

To the readers who loved it, his writing felt not like avant-garde experimentalism but truth-telling with a mesmerising force. He liked to quote the philosopher Pascal, who said that “it is not possible to have a reasonable belief against miracles”. Auster restored the realm of miracles – and its flip-side of fateful catastrophe – to American literature. Meanwhile, the “postmodern” sorcerer who conjured alternate or multiple selves in chiselled prose led (aptly enough) a double life as sociable pillar of the New York literary scene, a warm raconteur whose agile wit belied the brooding raptor-like image of his photoshoots. For four decades he lived in Brooklyn with his second wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt.

From a pioneering 1940s ‘gastrography’ to a recent novel about a real-life 18th-century French peasant cursed with an appetite to eat just about everything

Food in books has a way of lodging in the memory. For some it might be the kidneys on Leopold Bloom’s mind in Joyce’s Ulysses. For others, it’s the hard-won German sausage that Ratty finds at the end of Wind in the Willows. The book may be rich or grotesque, stark or sickly sweet, but we, the reader, are always invited to ask ourselves why, and how, we choose to take it in.

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The critically acclaimed American writer has died aged 77 . Here, contemporaries pay tribute to his life and work

• Paul Auster – a life in quotes

• Paul Auster – a life in pictures

British novelist
The exquisite chapter of domestic accidents that opens Paul Auster’s final novel, Baumgartner, leaves us with a microcosm of all that drew a worldwide, discerning readership to this super-abundantly gifted, big-hearted novelist: a limpid present tense; a subtle awareness, comic as well as tragic, of what Virgil identified as “ sunt lac rimae rerum ” – there are tears in the nature of things – which, in Paul’s version, proposed pratfalls as well as death; a perfect expression of a hovering consciousness in the still moment; and finally, a honed prose that seemed to hint that just below its surface were instructions on how to read it and how it was written. The adroit self-consciousness of his writing made him our supreme post-modernist. If his imagination seemed so spacious it was because he was as much a European as an American writer. If he had Thoreau at his back, he also had Beckett. It is possible to cross a Paul Auster Platz and walk down a rue Paul Auster . Not many novelists have been so honoured. As a presence he was ridiculously handsome, worldly, generous, funny and, unlike most great talkers, a highly attuned listener.

The author of The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and 4 3 2 1 has died at the age of 77. Here are some of the most memorable quotes from interviews he gave throughout his life

• Paul Auster, American author of The New York Trilogy, dies aged 77

I’ve always written by hand. Mostly with a fountain pen, but sometimes with a pencil – especially for corrections. If I could write directly on a typewriter or a computer, I would do it. But keyboards have always intimidated me. I’ve never been able to think clearly with my fingers in that position. A pen is a much more primitive instrument. You feel that the words are coming out of your body and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.

Only a person who really felt compelled to do it would shut himself up in a room every day … When I think about the alternatives – how beautiful life can be, how interesting – I think it’s a crazy way to live your life.

The excitement, the struggle, is emboldening and vivifying. I just feel more alive writing.

You can never achieve what you hope to achieve. You can come close sometimes and others may appreciate your work, but you, the author, will always feel you’ve failed. You know you’ve done your best, but your best isn’t good enough. Maybe that’s why you keep writing. So you can fail a little better the next time.

Generally, I don’t want to do things. I feel lazy and unmotivated. It’s only when an idea grabs hold of me and I can’t get rid of it, when I try not to think about it and yet it’s ambushing me all the time … That’s how it begins. A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It’s a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It’s the music of the language, but it’s also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that’s because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

‘Postmodern’ is a term I don’t understand … there’s an arrogance to all this labelling, a self-assurance that I find to be distasteful, if not dishonest. I try to be humble in the face of my own confusions, and I don’t want to elevate my doubts to some status they don’t deserve. I’m really stumbling. I’m really in the dark. I don’t know . And if that – what I would call honesty – qualifies as postmodern, then OK, but it’s not as if I ever wanted to write a book that sounded like John Barth or Robert Coover .

I think a moment comes at around the age of about five or six when you have a thought and become capable of telling yourself, simultaneously, that you are thinking that thought. This doubling occurs when we begin to reflect on our own thinking. Once you can do that, you are able to tell the story of yourself to yourself. We all have a continuous, unbroken narrative within ourselves about who we are, and we go on telling it every day of our lives.

Some people are able to tell a more or less truthful story about themselves. Others are fantasists. Their sense of who they are is so at odds with what the rest of the world feels about them that they become pathetic … Then, there’s the other extreme, the people who diminish themselves in their own minds. They’re often much greater people than they think they are and, often, much admired by others. Still, they kill themselves inside. Almost by definition, the good are hard on themselves – and the less than good believe they’re the best.

Human beings are imponderable, they can rarely be captured in words. If you open yourself up to all the different aspects of a person, you are usually left in a state of befuddlement.

(When asked about a moment when a boy standing next to him at a summer camp was killed by a lightning strike.) It was the seminal experience of my life. At 14 everything you go through is deep. You are a work-in-progress. But being right next to a boy who was essentially murdered by the gods changed my whole view of the world. I had assumed that the little bourgeois comforts of my life in postwar suburban New Jersey had a kind of order. And then I realised that nothing had that sort of order. I’ve lived with that thought ever since. It’s chilling, but also liberating.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

A visit to a delapidated London flat unlocks a treasure-trove of reminiscences across six decades

In 1994, Hugo Greenhalgh was a researcher on a television documentary about the history of male sex workers and their clients. Dispatched to interview George Leo John Lucas, a 68-year-old retired civil servant, and a loyalty-card-worthy frequenter of London’s bygone “meatracks”, Greenhalgh arrives at a dishevelled Clapham flat that makes Miss Havisham’s Satis House resemble a Barratt show home. The reeking Lucas emerges from the detritus in a torn suit, looking “as if he’d risen from the grave”. What catches the young man’s eye even as he holds his nose is an entire wall of diaries: a volume a year since 1948.

These turn out to comprise an unparalleled document of an ordinary gay man (rather than a Kenneth Williams or a Joe Orton) eking out his life. The Britain he inhabits staggers its way from an easy-come, easy-go tolerance of queerness during the war years, to an ice age of bigotry scarcely tempered by the partial decriminalisation of sex between men in England and Wales in 1967. Through it all, Lucas calmly goes about his business: working at the Board of Trade by day, out on the gay scene at night, picking up labourers, guardsmen and gangsters – some paid for, others won fair – nursing assorted crushes and grudges, then cataloguing it all once his bed has gone cold.

On the centenary of his death, a new English translation of the great writer’s journals reveals some surprising details

After his death on 3 June 1924, a letter was found in Franz Kafka’s office in Prague addressed to Max Brod. “Dear Max, My last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.”

His friend did not honour Kafka’s wishes. “Brod was unshakably convinced of their immeasurable value to contemporary and future humanity, and he was right,” says Ross Benjamin , whose new translation of the Czech writer’s diaries is published in this centenary year of Kafka’s death.

The Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times foreign correspondent provides fascinating insights into surviving his job and his 2019 diagnosis with an aggressive form of brain cancer in this inspiring journal of self-discovery

In the searing heat in Delhi in July 2019, the New York Times foreign correspondent Rod Nordland went for a morning jog across the city. It was more than 48C (120F), and the monsoon rains had arrived the previous day.

The Pulitzer prize-winning war reporter collapsed during the run, with a witness describing him reeling in circles, arms raised, before falling to the ground with a seizure. He had been struck down by an undiagnosed malignant brain tumour. Within days, Nordland had been flown back to the US by the New York Times and was being treated at the Weill Cornell medical center in New York, one of the best hospitals in the world.

The politician and lawyer on Salman Rushdie’s remarkable new memoir, Manchester’s magnificent music students and powerful depictions of wars both real and imagined

The human rights lawyer and campaigner Baroness Shami Chakrabarti was born in Kenton, north-west London, in 1969. She studied law at the London School of Economics and worked as an in-house lawyer at the Home Office before becoming director of the advocacy group Liberty in 2003, a role she held until 2016. That year, she became a life peer and was appointed shadow attorney general for England and Wales (until 2020). Chakrabarti lives in south London and has one son. Her third book, Human Rights: The Case for the Defence ,is published by Allen Lane on 2 May.

The broadcaster knew she had a link to the central Asian country she first visited on her gap year 30 years ago. But retracing her steps, this time with her mother in tow, she made a big discovery about their family

‘Can you read what it says?” It was 1992 and I was standing in Samarkand’s impressive Registan Square, looking up at Arabic inscriptions on 15th- and 17th-century buildings, when an Uzbek man approached me, speaking in Russian. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, but he had lived his life in a period when Cyrillic script had been dominant and Islamic learning discouraged. Now, seeing a stranger trying to decipher the words on the buildings of his city, he wanted to know if I could explain them to him.

Back then, I was on my gap year and living in Moscow teaching English at a specialist language school, where many of my pupils were the children of officials, diplomats and – almost certainly – KGB agents. It was a time of political transition and widespread hardship, including rising prices and struggles to access food, even through the black market. The six of us who had come from the UK were largely protected from that, as whatever we had from home was in sterling, precious hard currency, rather than roubles. When the school had a spring holiday that March, we decided to fly nearly 2,000 miles south-east and see something of Uzbekistan, then emerging from decades as one of the Soviet socialist republics.