Paul Auster has narrated 9 audiobooks on Listento.it by 2 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 15 ratings. The most-rated is 4 3 2 1.
4 3 2 1
Summary
This program is narrated by—and includes a bonus interview with—the author. Paul Auster's greatest, most heartbreaking and satisfying novel—a sweeping and surprising story of birthright and possibility, of love and of life itself: a masterpiece. Nearly two weeks early, on March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four identical Fergusons made of the same DNA, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Athletic skills and sex lives and friendships and intellectual passions contrast. Each Ferguson falls under the spell of the magnificent Amy Schneiderman, yet each Amy and each Ferguson have a relationship like no other. Meanwhile, listeners will take in each Ferguson's pleasures and ache from each Ferguson's pains, as the mortal plot of each Ferguson's life rushes on. As inventive and dexterously constructed as anything Paul Auster has ever written, yet with a passion for realism and a great tenderness and fierce attachment to history and to life itself that listeners have never heard from Auster before. 4 3 2 1 is a marvelous and unforgettably affecting tour de force.
©2017 Paul Auster (P)2017 Macmillan Audio
The Brooklyn Follies
Summary
Nathan Glass has come to Brooklyn to die. Divorced, estranged from his only daughter, the retired life insurance salesman seeks only solitude and anonymity. Then Nathan finds his long-lost nephew, Tom Wood, working in a local bookstore, a far cry from the brilliant academic career he'd begun when Nathan saw him last. Tom's boss is the charismatic Harry Brightman, whom fate has also brought to the "ancient kingdom of Brooklyn, New York". Through Tom and Harry, Nathan's world gradually broadens to include a new set of acquaintances, not to mention a stray relative or two, and leads him to a reckoning with his past. Among the many twists in the delicious plot are a scam involving a forgery of the first page of The Scarlet Letter, a disturbing revelation that takes place in a sperm bank, and an impossible, utopian dream of a rural refuge. Meanwhile, the wry and acerbic Nathan has undertaken something he calls The Book of Human Folly, in which he proposes "to set down in the simplest, clearest language possible an account of every blunder, every pratfall, every embarrassment, every idiocy, every foible, and every inane act I had committed during my long and checkered career as a man". But life takes over instead, and Nathan's despair is swept away as he finds himself more and more implicated in the joys and sorrows of others. The Brooklyn Follies is Paul Auster's warmest, most exuberant novel, a moving and unforgettable hymn to the glories and mysteries of ordinary human life.
©2005 Paul Auster (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Sunset Park
Summary
Luminous, passionate, expansive, an emotional tour de force, Sunset Park follows the hopes and fears of a cast of unforgettable characters brought together by the mysterious Miles Heller during the dark months of the 2008 economic collapse. An enigmatic young man employed as a trash-out worker in southern Florida obsessively photographing thousands of abandoned objects left behind by the evicted families. A group of young people squatting in an apartment in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world. William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives. A celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway. An independent publisher desperately trying to save his business and his marriage. These are just some of the elements Auster magically weaves together in this immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts. Sunset Park is a surprising departure that confirms Paul Auster as one of our greatest living writers.
©2010 Paul Auster (P)2010 Macmillan Audio
Winter Journal
Summary
From the best-selling novelist and author of The Invention of Solitude comes a moving and highly personal meditation on the body, time, and language itself. "That is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well." Facing his 63rd winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations - both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.
©2012 Paul Auster (P)2012 Macmillan Audio
The Sonic Memorial Project
Summary
The Sonic Memorial Project is a collection of radio stories and audio artifacts commemorating the life and history of the World Trade Center and its neighborhood. Shortly after September 11, 2001, NPR's Lost & Found Sound brought together radio producers, archivists, new media artists, historians, and public radio stations nationwide to collect and preserve the stories and sounds of the World Trade Center and its neighborhood. With National Public Radio, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (The Kitchen Sisters) set up a phone line and invited listeners to contribute their voice mails, remembrances, home recordings, and shards of sound to this documentary effort. Hundreds called with their stories and audio artifacts, both personal and historic. These recordings, along with interviews gathered by radio producers across the country, are presented in this collection of stories broadcast on NPR during the year following the attack. The archive and project continue online at www.sonicmemorial.org where one can explore the archive, contribute sounds and stories, and immerse oneself in the Sonic Browser, an interactive soundscape of stories and audio fragments. The Sonic Memorial Project is a national collaboration with Lost & Found Sound, NPR, Picture Project, WNYC, transom.org, Radio Diaries, Ben Shapiro Productions, dotsperinch, Sound Portraits, Creative Time, MPR/Public Radio Collaboration, and independent producers nationwide. Major project funding provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting & The National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support provided by The Ford Foundation, California Arts Council, and the Sonic Memorial Fund.
©2001 The Kitchen Sisters Productions
Report from the Interior
Summary
Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to date. In the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts… Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior. From his baby's-eye view of the man in the moon, to his childhood worship of the movie cowboy Buster Crabbe, to the composition of his first poem at the age of nine, to his dawning awareness of the injustices of American life, Report from the interior charts Auster's moral, political, and intellectual journey as he inches his way toward adulthood through the postwar 1950s and into the turbulent 1960s. Auster evokes the sounds, smells, and tactile sensations that marked his early life - and the many images that came at him, including moving images (he adored cartoons, he was in love with films), until, at its unique climax, the audiobook breaks away from prose into pure imagery: The final section of Report from the Interior recapitulates the first three parts. At once a story of the times - which makes it everyone's story - and the story of the emerging consciousness of a renowned literary artist, this four-part work answers the challenge of autobiography in ways rarely, if ever, seen before.
©2013 Paul Auster (P)2013 Macmilllan Audio
Invisible
Summary
"One of America's greatest novelists" dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story in his most passionate and surprising book to date. Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster's 15th novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when 20-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girlfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as "one of America's most spectacularly inventive writers."
©2009 Paul Auster (P)2009 Macmillan Audio
Oracle Night
Summary
Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, 34-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationery shop in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn and buys a blue notebook. It is September 18, 1982, and for the next nine days Orr will live under the spell of this blank book, trapped inside a world of eerie premonitions and bewildering events that threaten to destroy his marriage and undermine his faith in reality. Why does his wife suddenly break down in tears in the backseat of a taxi just hours after Sidney begins writing in the notebook? Why does M.R. Chang, the owner of the stationery shop, precipitously shut down his business the next day? What are the connections between a 1938 Warsaw telephone directory and a lost novel in which the hero can predict the future? At what point does animosity explode into violence? To what degree is forgiveness the ultimate expression of love? Paul Auster's mesmerizing eleventh novel reads like an old-fashioned ghost story. But there are no ghosts in this book, only flesh-and-blood human beings, wandering through the haunted realms of everyday life. At once a meditation on the nature of time and a journey through the labyrinth of one man's imagination, Oracle Night is a narrative tour de force that confirms Auster's reputation as one of the boldest, most original writers at work in America today.
©2003 Paul Auster (P)2003 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
The Book of Illusions
Summary
After losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he sees a clip from a lost film by the silent comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to study the works of this mysterious figure who vanished from sight in 1929. Presumed dead for 60 years, Hector Mann was a comic genius who had flashed briefly across American movie screens, tantalizing the public with the promise of a brilliant future. Then, just as the silent era came to an end, he walked out of his house one January morning and was never heard from again. Zimmer's research leads him to write the first full-length study of Hector's films. Upon publication the following year, a letter turns up bearing a return address from New Mexico, supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision from him, changing his life forever.
©2002 Paul Auster (P)2002 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.