This book offers a different, original approach to the work of Paul Auster, one of America's best-known contemporary authors. With a special focus on his films and collaborative projects, it explores the entangled relationships between his texts by reading them in largely posthumanist terms as a rhizomatic facto-fictional network produced by a set of writing tools. The book is a bold scholarly quest to follow the work of these few recurrent "things" in Auster's texts, which together assemble his emblematic writer-figure - the smoking, typewriting New York writer. This character, that resembles the empirical author himself, is what seems to work as both Auster's "writing machine" and the text being "written". This book, then, is also an exploration of various "writing tools" (cigarettes, typewriters, doppelgangers, cityscapes) used by the writer, and the ways their metaphoric potencies work to produce texts and meanings.
Taking the work of Auster as an illustrative case, this is, in a broader sense, a book about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them,and the ways that such machines invest them with meaning.This work is not only of critical investigation, but also of critical collaboration, as in the final chapter its author ends up tracing the pathways that Auster's characters mark in the spaces of New York, and confronts Paul Auster himself with a doubled version of him produced by this book. This raises not only questions about the ultimate meaning of Auster's work, but also, more generally, about the relationship between texts, their authors, their readers and their interpretive critics.
