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The inimitable Paul Auster launches the limited edition manuscript of his New York Trilogy with fellow author Luc Sante at the Strand’s Rare Book Room. Paul will undoubtedly share never before seen or heard thoughts of The New York Trilogy's journey from infancy to publication.
Some words about the limited edition manuscript:
Specialized in the reproduction of major manuscripts, SP Books are happy to present three drafts from Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy. In 2014 the publisher went to the New York Public Library to explore the papers of one of our greatest contemporary writers, Paul Auster. This colossal archive bears witness to the evolution of a novel, the generation of a publication through all its intermediary stages, from beginning to end.
After summarily sketching out the plot, he writes his first versions in notebooks which represent weeks, months, or years of his life. There are usually around ten handwritten and as many as three typewritten drafts of a single text, the latter containing numerous corrections in pen. The document he hands his publisher is the final version of a text that has gone through many incarnations.
A veritable time capsule, the book contains hand- and typewritten manuscripts of The New York Trilogy, carefully selected in cooperation with Paul Auster to shed light on this major work’s architecture. The first, a handwritten sketch of City of Glass, entitled New York Confidential, is followed by a nearly definitive typewritten version of Ghosts, initially called Black Outs, and a quite advanced manuscript of The Locked Room, whose first title was Ghosts. Like Mr. Auster’s enigmatic New York, this is “an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps”.
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of “Winter Journal,” “Sunset Park,” “Invisible,” “The Book of Illusions,” and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, the Prix Médicis étranger, an Independent Spirit Award, and the Premio Napoli. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Luc Sante's books include “Low Life,” “Evidence,” “The Factory of Facts,” “Kill All Your Darlings,” and “The Other Paris.” He teaches at Bard. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But according to renowned historian and best-selling author Jill Lepore, it rests, too, on “a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching.” Witty, endlessly curious, and astonishingly lucid, Lepore returns to CHF with “the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades." American cultural historian Eric Slauter joins Lepore for a conversation focused on her groundbreaking investigation of an American past that claims to have placed truth itself at the center of the nation’s history—and asks whether the actual course of events has supported this claim or, in fact, belied it. 
The Writers Studio, in partnership with The Strand Bookstore, is pleased to present The Pushcart Prize XLIII - Best of the Small Presses 2019. Published every year since 1976, The Pushcart Prize is the most honored literary project in America, featuring hundreds of presses and writers of short stories, poetry, and essays in its annual collections.
Come together and connect with our writers' community, with readings by:
Cortney Lamar Charleston
Rick Moody
Thylias Moss
Oliver de la Paz
Marisa Silver
Introduction by founder/editor Bill Henderson.
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, AGNI, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus.
Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm, Demonology, Hotels of North America, and many other books. He writes about music at The Rumpus and has an advice column at LitHub.
Thylias Moss, prize-winning multiracial maker, has won a number of awards beginning in 1983 with her poem, “Coming of Age in Sandusky,” for which she received $25.00 from the Cleveland, Ohio Public Library. Since then, she has authored a total of 15 books, most of which have won awards, notably, a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, and two finalist awards from the National Book Critics Circle Award. She will be featuring her novel in verse, Slave Moth written by a literate slave girl, “Varl,” a collection she needed to make after a visit to her son’s middle school, a trip that necessitated her making the dress on the cover, by hand in the dark.
Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Requiem for the Orchard, winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry. His honors include a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award and a 2009 GAP Grant from Artist Trust. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Virginia Quarterly Review, North American Review, Tin House, Chattahoochee Review, and in anthologies such as Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation.
Marisa Silver is the author of four novels, including Little Nothing and Mary Coin, and two collections of short stories. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work has received the Ohioana Book Prize, the Southern California Independent Bookseller Award, and the O. Henry Award. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, as well as other journals, and has been included in The Best American Short Stories and other anthologies. She is a 2018-19 New York Public Library Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow during which time she’ll be working on a new novel, The Mysteries.
Founded in 1987 by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Philip Schultz, The Writers Studio is an independent creative writing program, offering six and eight-week workshops specializing in topics from the necessity of political fiction to writers beginning in their fifties. The classes, which meet in New York City, San Francisco, Tucson, the Hudson Valley and Online utilize an original teaching method which combines technique-based instruction with personal weekly feedback. Since its inception in 1990, The Writers Studio Reading Series has featured numerous writers and poets, including Lydia Davis, Junot Diaz, Andre Dubus III, Jennifer Egan, Mary Gaitskill, Julia Glass, Edward Hirsch, A.M. Homes, Etgar Keret, Marie Ponsot, Robert Pinsky, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, and Yehuda Amichai. www.writerstudio.com Acclaimed scholar and humanist Martha C. Nussbaum turns her attention to the current political climate crisis of party polarization, divisive rhetoric, and the increasing inability of two halves of the country to communicate with one another in her most recent work, The Monarchy of Fear. At the heart of the problem, Nussbaum sees a simple truth: The political is always emotional, and the psychological constant of fear of the other will always be at-the-ready to fuel the fires of anger, disgust, envy, and blame. Drawing on a mix of historical and contemporary examples, from classical Athens to the musical Hamilton, Nussbaum will discuss the emotions behind our political culture, and suggest a roadmap for where we might go next.
