An anthology of short stories both fiction and non-fiction and conversations. Capote is a master at creating settings and conjuring up personalities. The central story, a novella entitled Handcarved Coffins, follows the same guidelines as In Cold Blood yet is even more terrifying and haunting.
In this emotionally charged narrative, a man's obsession with a silent film star leads him into a shadowy realm of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. Six months after the tragic loss of his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer is engulfed in alcoholic grief and self-pity. One night, he discovers a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann, igniting his curiosity. Zimmer embarks on a global journey to research Mann, who mysteriously vanished in 1929 and was presumed dead for sixty years. After publishing his book, Zimmer receives a letter from a small New Mexico town, allegedly from Hector's wife, inviting him to meet Hector, who has supposedly read the book. Doubtful yet intrigued, Zimmer hesitates until a mysterious woman appears at his door, compelling him to make a life-altering decision. This stunning tale immerses readers in a world where the comic and tragic, real and imagined, violent and tender intertwine seamlessly. The author delivers one of his most powerful and emotionally rich works, exploring themes of obsession, loss, and the nature of reality.
Baumgartner's life has been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna. But now Anna is gone, and Baumgartner is embarking on his seventies whilst trying to live with her absence. Rich with compassion, wit and Auster's keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient episodes of ordinary life, 'Baumgartner' is a tender late masterpiece of the ache of memory. It asks: why do we find such meaning in certain moments, and forget others?
Paul Auster's Sunset Park is set in the sprawling flatlands of Florida, where twenty-eight-year-old Miles is photographing the last lingering traces of families who have abandoned their houses due to debt or foreclosure. Miles is haunted by guilt for having inadvertently caused the death of his step-brother, a situation that caused him to flee his father and step-mother in New York seven years ago.What keeps him in Florida is his relationship with a teenage high-school girl, Pilar, but when her family threatens to expose their relationship, Miles decides to protect Pilar by going back to Brooklyn, where he settles in a squat to prepare himself to face the inevitable confrontation with his father - a confrontation he has been avoiding for years.Set against the backdrop of the devastating global recession, and pulsing with the energy of Auster's previous novel Invisible, Sunset Park is as mythic as it is contemporary, as in love with baseball as it is with literature. It is above all, a story about love and forgiveness - not only among men and women, but also between fathers and sons.
From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes readers on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered ID card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.