A Life in Words ─ Conversation With I. B. Siegumfeldt

An inside look into Paul Auster's art and craft, the inspirations and obsessions, mesmerizing and dramatic in turn.

A remarkably candid, and often surprisingly dramatic, investigation into one writer's art, craft, and life, A Life in Words is rooted in three years of dialogue between Auster and Professor I. B. Siegumfeldt, starting in 2011, while Siegumfeldt was in the process of launching the Center for Paul Auster Studies at the University of Copenhagen. It includes a number of surprising disclosures, both concerning Auster's work and about the art of writing generally. It is a book that's full of surprises, unscripted yet amounting to a sharply focused portrait of the inner workings of one of America's most productive and successful writers, through all twenty-one of Auster's narrative works and the themes and obsessions that drive them.

PAUL AUSTER is one of the very few giants of English-language literature who has successfully made the leap from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. A poet and translator before he crossed over to mainstream relevance as a memoirist and novelist, Auster continues to challenge and dazzle his readers in America and around the world. But though there are many books and countless PhDs on Auster, we as a society are far from having decided what he means to us, and haven't yet begun to let him chance and provoke us as thoroughly as he must--as James Joyce or Beckett has, for example. Auster lives in Brooklyn. His most recent novel is 4 3 2 1.

I. B. SIEGUMFELDT in an associate professor of English Germanic, and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the driving force behind the Paul Auster Center that is housed there.