The New York Trilogy

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Not quite like any other entry on this list, Paul Auster's New York Trilogy is a series of novels that were first published sequentially but have since been presented in a single volume.

Alas, isn'tthatexactly what New York is? An amalgamation of stark differences that, with a seeming touch of magic, coalesce to present an oddly uniform image of thecharacter of the city? The period following Auster's years at university is well-documented in his autobiography, Hand to Mouth: the abandoned post-graduate degree; the job as an all-round scrubber and mopper on an oil tanker for a few months, the following four years scraping by in Paris. When Hawaiiannovelist Hanya Yanagihara released A Little Life in 2015, the world noticed—and everyone seems to still be talking about it. He was doing writing commissions, like translations, for money, but this meant he didn't have time to concentrate on his poetry which caused him enormous frustration." Auster also wrote about this part of his life in The Invention of Solitude and the descriptions of his depression and loss ("He feels himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence"), presage the lonely and dislocated characters he created a few years later, particularly Quinn in New York Trilogy and David in his latest novel, his 10th, The Book of Illusions.The 2000 novel did win the Pulitzer Price for Fiction in 2001, after all. What's more, Bret Easton Ellis even called it "one of the three great books of my generation" alongside Jonthan Franzen's The Corrections and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. It was not a happy marriage," he says, in his deep, measured voice with a slight smoker's growl. "But I don't think I particularly suffered from it." A popular, sporty child, he morphed into withdrawn, angry teenager. His younger sister, always a fragile girl, simply, he says, "snapped in her 20s and has never put herself together again". Despite, or perhaps because of his rather unliterary upbringing - his mother had "no particular interest in writing" and his father, who died before Paul achieved critical success, was bemused by how he had "produced a poet for a son" - Auster has a very traditional view of the role of the author, almost self-consciously so. In Hand to Mouth he writes, "Becoming a writer... [you] don't choose it so much as get chosen." Lauterbach agrees: "Ever since I've known him, Paul has wanted to be a writer with a capital W." It is astounding to think that the author of the literarymasterpiece that is In Cold Blood is the same one who gifted the world Breakfast at Tiffany's. Alas, that is where Truman Capote’s brilliance lays: his ability to inhabit any world and catapult the reader into a romanticized yet true-to-reality version of, well, reality.

Although published in 1973, the novel clearly explores topics that are at the heart of today's culture, especially given New York's devotion to the concept of celebrity and the constant paparazzi that swirm around town.

Clearly referring to racial passing, a term thatcalls out to the practice of presenting oneself as belonging to a different racial group given ambiguous physical attributes, this 1929 novel by Nella Larsen was ahead of its time, likely given the author's own mixed heritge. Fiction: 1987 New York Trilogy; '88 In the Country of Last Things; '89 Moon Palace '91 The Music of Chance '92 Leviathan '94 Mr Vertigo '99 Timbuktu 2002 The Book of Illusions Strikingly, Auster, who almost always writes in the first person both in fiction and non-fiction, becomes in the story of his own life, "A". The distance created by slipping from first to third person reads like a quiet sigh of denial and loneliness, of someone who, he writes, was "living to the side of himself". That is allto say that, yes, Lauren Weisberg's uber successfulnovel about Andrea Sachs, a Brown University graduate who moves to New York City in the hopes of pursuing a career in publishing, deserves a spot in the local literary canon.

The1943 semi-autobiographical A Tree Grows in Brooklyntakes place in the Williamsburg of days yore, before world-renowned restaurants and super-tall skyscrapers revolutionized thearea and brought itone step closer to Manhattan. It's hard to write a good horror novel, and it's even harder to write one based in New York City—which is probably why no book within the genre has yet reached the level of fame that Ira Levin's 1967 Rosemary's Baby enjoys.Not many novels focus on the Chinese immigrant experience within the confines of a New York lifestyle—a fact that automatically makes Weike Wang's Joan is Okay worthy of discussion. And yet, upon a second reading, the book suddenly feels just as ridiculous as the mid-1980swerelike in New York—which is the exact time frame that the character dwells in. The 1958 novella introduces audiences to Holly Golightly, a naive and spoiled society girl played by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film adaptation of the literary work. Pete Hamill, who passed at the age of 85 in 2020, was the embodiment of New York. A prolific writer through and through with a deep relationship with Brooklyn (and local sports teams!), Hamill spent his entire lifechronicling the city's cultural happeningsboth at his jobs at The New York Post and the Daily News andall throughout his many books, including Forever, his 2003work of fiction about a man who is grantedimmortalityas long as he never leaves Manhattan.

That's likely due to the candid nature of the author's writing and subject matter: trauma, disability, depression, shame and chronic pain. A TV adaptation of the book has been in the works for years and it will finally air on Apple TV some time this year.

Herebyrests the "Great New York Novel" conundrum: can contendeers like The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Bell Jar and Jazz realistically be mentioned alongside the likes of The Devil Wears Prada? He fled to New York to study at Columbia in 1965, but the sense of isolation went with him. As he had done at home, he hid by "reading like a demon. Really, I think every idea I have came to me in those years. I don't think I've had a new idea since I was 20." I had jumped off the edge, and then, at the very last moment, something reached out and caught me in midair. That something is what I define as love. It is the one thing that can stop a man from falling, powerful enough to negate the laws of gravity.”