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The image of the storyteller, actually or metaphorically imprisoned because of dominant social conditions, attempting to make an impact on consciousness and avert tragedy from the margins, interacts with the figure of the ascetic writer throughout Paul Auster’s fiction. In several novels Auster’s protagonists retreat to a small room and emerge as something other than a storyteller, acting within a supposedly “democratic” process. Indeed, the scenario often outlined in Auster’s fiction is that the protagonist encounters obstacles to the production of narratives that can influence the consciousness of the reader, and resorts to some form of political activism, coercion or “terrorism”. In many respects it could be argued that Auster’s interaction with writing, politics and direct political action mirrors that of one of his literary idols, Henry David Thoreau. As I will outline below, Thoreau’s writing and documented career can be taken as an exemplary illustration of the paradox between the literary writer’s drive to move readers’ hearts and minds as part of the democratic process of publication, and the drive towards coercion, a drive to impose one’s own world view on one’s subject. This is a true paradox, as often a coercive figure such as a terrorist and a writer can work from a point of opposition to exactly the same political issue, and only differ over which method to adopt. It could also be argued, conversely, that in certain instances the terrorist, in common with the dominant social order, uses methods of coercion to assume total authority over its subject. This may bring to mind Richard Rorty’s succinct summary of the central problem of contemporary literary theory as being: “the problem of how to overcome authority without claiming authority” (105). This “Thoreauvian paradox”, it will be demonstrated, is present in Auster’s early work and could be used to challenge some of the tunnel-visioned “postmodernist” readings that seemed to pervade the critical response. In this essay, I will first outline how the career of Thoreau can be seen as an exemplary illustration of the competing drives in a literary writer towards asceticism and political activism. After this I will demonstrate similarities in Auster’s approach to these subjects before providing an alternative reading of Ghosts set in the context of The New York Trilogy as a whole, arguing that Auster consciously uses both Walden and Thoreau as a literary figure to investigate contradictions which concerned him as a young writer. Having established the presence of these competing drives in Auster’s early works, I will conclude by focusing on the way that this tendency was revisited and evolved in later works.

This essay makes a partial defence for the late Paul Auster's Sunset Park in relation to negative criticism that the novel received around the time of its publication. The theoretical framework applied is to view the novel as a literary example of the positions taken within the unresolved philosophical debate around 'moral luck'1 being articulated through the process of storytelling. The 'Problem of Moral Luck' as conceived by Thomas Nagel (1979) is a perceived conflict between the view that people should only be held morally accountable for things that are under their control and everyday moral judgments that seem to hold people morally accountable for things which are not under their control. Nagel identified four different types of moral luck, three of which, it is argued, are relevant to Sunset Park

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) In volume 43, issue 1 of this journal, I expressed my disappointment that two converted PhDs by Brendan Martin and Mark Brown recapitulated exhausted areas of analysis when so much of Auster's oeuvre and his extensive list of influences remained unexplored. Understanding Paul Auster by James Peacock contains the least original material of the three as it works within the remit of a series aimed at \"introducingâ[euro] the work of canonical American authors \"as planned guides or companions for students as well as good non-academic readersâ[euro] (Series Editor's Preface). Because of this, extensive sections are dedicated to summary of Auster's novels, in particular The New York Trilogy, and to informing readers about publication details and what critics have made of his work. [...]despite Auster's natural empathy with \"negativeâ[euro] European (and specifically Jewish) philosophical and poetic roots, Auster's fiction is infused with the insight that the generic confines of lyric poetry were too restrictive for the positive and outgoing concerns that resound in his prose work.

Roth and Celebrity is composed of 10 original essays that consider the vexed and ambivalent relationship between Philip Roth and his own celebrity as revealed both in personal interviews as well as in the fiction that spans his publishing history. With its simultaneous interest in American popular culture and the work of the most important living American writer to-date, the collection will hold wide appeal to advanced readers in American studies, literary scholarship, and film.

In switching the name of J.R.'s uncle from Steve to Charlie and showing Dickens's profile, the neon sign above the bar and the profile again on the bar's baseball shirts (in the memoir the bar is called Publicans and was formerly Dickens), there is a fairly obvious attempt to ask us to think about Dickens from the outset and throughout. [...]on the surface the movie does gloss over the harsher realities of poverty, social division and exploitation, leaving the viewer with a sense that is all is well in the world if a person is lucky in their personal and familial relationships. For the viewer looking for Dickens connections, it could not possibly be further away from poor Pip's lament of those 'who raised him by hand' - 'if only they would leave me alone', although this still somehow comes to mind.

According to Schreier, JALS takes for granted that such Jewish American writers as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Bernard Malamud have penetrated the American literary mainstream; for him, this assumption and its implications became the foundation for the institutionalized, disciplinary study of Jewish American literature. Schreier ultimately claims that the idea of organizing the study ofJewish American literature as a means to recognize a population is \"fundamentally racialist\" and that the concept of a \"Jewish people\" is a policing mechanism that invests and administers JALS as a field of knowledge. According to Schreier, JALS as a field is often considered only in relation to Holocaust history and trauma theory, playing \"second fiddle\" to Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, and other European language literatures in academic Jewish Studies contexts. There is an extended discussion of how Cynthia Ozick came to define \"Jewishness\" based on her idea of \"midrash\"-an ethically framed practice of close reading to define Jewish literary identity through non-ethnographic forms.

Dan O'Brien's personal dialogue with Edna O'Brien lends the book its originality; this correspondence, when read alongside what is known of the relationship between the two authors and the interview that Roth conducted with Edna O'Brien in 1984, adds weight and depth to the arguments in Fine Meshwork. Fine Meshwork argues that, while O'Brien's marriage to the \"outsider\" Ernest Gébler understandably influenced her early trilogy, she in fact represents this relationship specifically-and yet more subtly-to rail against Irish censorship while simultaneously subverting the sexual restraint and restrictions of post-independence Irish monoculture. The reader is reminded that anti-Semitism was so deeply ingrained in Irish culture that the Holocaust was not believed, that rising numbers of Jewish immigrants were seen as the \"cause\" of anti-Semitism, and that many Irish conflated Jews and English as swindlers and enemies (75-77).