Oracle Night
By Paul Auster
(Picador, Paperback, 9780312423667, 256pp.)
Publication Date: October 14, 2004
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Audio Cassette, Paperback, Paperback, Hardcover
Categories: Psychological
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Several months into his recovery from a near-fatal illness, thirty-four-year-old novelist Sidney Orr enters a stationary 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.
A novel that expands to fill volumes in the reader's mind, Oracle Night is a beautifully constructed meditation on time, love, storytelling and the imagination by one of America's boldest and most original writers.
PAUL AUSTER's most recent novel, The Book of Illusions, was a national bestseller, as was I Thought My Father Was God, the NPR National Story Project anthology, which he edited. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
"A Joseph Cornell box in the form of a novel, with the same wistful tone and sense of meanings just below the surface...It's urban mysticism, a poetry of the hidden and the almost forgotten, with the supernatural power deriving equally from the city and the novelist's imagination....A snow globe of a novel."
--John Homans, New York Magazine
"Beguiling...Auster is a natural story-teller, with a seemingly inexhaustible trove of yarns at his disposal. All of the stories within stories are compelling in their own right...a joy to read."
--The Economist
"Another complicated and suspenseful page-turner...Another tremendous and memorable effort by one of our most brilliant writers."
--Thomas Haley, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Austerland is tricky, filled with dark narrative alleyways and sidewinding plots. One might not wish to play cards with Paul Auster...It's a kind of seduction to dizzy the reader the way Auster does, layering, intermingling and cross-referencing the many stories until one forgets which is the primary and which secondary and who is telling any of them."
--Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review
"Compulsively readable yet wonderfully complex and unsettling."
--Eric Grunwald, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"As in New York Trilogy [Auster] subverts our expectations of what a mystery story should be, and the reading experience is far richer for it."
--Philip Connors, Newsday
"[Auster] shines as a fabulist and tale-teller, putting a high-modernist gloss on noir."
--The New Yorker
"Oracle Night is a triumph for novelist Auster. It cements his growing reputation as one of America's most inventive and original writers."
--Deloris Tarzan Ament, The Seattle Times
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