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The Book of Illusions (Secrets and Lies Ed)

The Book of Illusions (Secrets and Lies Ed)

by PaulAuster (Author)

  • Used

    Paperback 2011

    $5.39

  • Used

    Paperback 2003

    $3.25

  • New

    Paperback 2009

    $19.27
Synopsis

One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in grief. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann, and remembers how to laugh ...Mann was a comic genius, in trademark white suit and fluttering black moustache. But one morning in 1929 he walked out of his house and was never heard from again. Zimmer's obsession with Mann drives him to publish a study of his work; whereupon he receives a letter postmarked New Mexico, supposedly written by Mann's wife, and inviting him to visit the great Mann himself. Can Hector Mann be alive? Zimmer cannot decide - until a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. Written with breath-taking urgency and precision, this stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another.

$5.39

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 336
 Edition: Secrets and Lies Edition
 Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 07 Jul 2011
ISBN 10: 0571275567
ISBN 13: 9780571275564
Book Overview: As part of Faber's Secrets and Lies series comes a classic noirish novel of deception and deceit.

Media Reviews
A nearly flawless work, and is the best argument among many that Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time. -- San Francisco Chronicle
Mr. Auster' s elegant, finely calibrated The Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship...Hector is an inspired creation...more immediate than many flesh-and-blood actors. -- The New York Times
One of his finest [novels]: an elegant meditation on the question of whether an artist or his public ' owns' the work he creates, and a thickly plotted succession of interlocking mysteries reminiscent of his highly praised New York Trilogy...gripping and immensely satisfying. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An older and wiser Auster has added a new ingredient to the metaphysical play and deft storytelling, a sadness that colors all illusion, that creates a stunningly moving and very real portrait of a man over-marked by death....It is a story of unspeakable grief told with virtuousic brilliance, which Auster finally brings safely to Earth with a very human simplicity. -- Los Angeles Times

A nearly flawless work, and is the best argument among many that Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time. -- San Francisco Chronicle
Mr. Auster's elegant, finely calibrated The Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship...Hector is an inspired creation...more immediate than many flesh-and-blood actors. -- The New York Times
One of his finest [novels]: an elegant meditation on the question of whether an artist or his public 'owns' the work he creates, and a thickly plotted succession of interlocking mysteries reminiscent of his highly praised New York Trilogy...gripping and immensely satisfying. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An older and wiser Auster has added a new ingredient to the metaphysical play and deft storytelling, a sadness that colors all illusion, that creates a stunningly moving and very real portrait of a man over-marked by death....It is a story of unspeakable grief told with virtuousic brilliance, which Auster finally brings safely to Earth with a very human simplicity. -- Los Angeles Times

A nearly flawless work . . . Auster will be remembered as one of the great writers of our time. -- San Francisco Chronicle

Mr. Auster's elegant, finely calibrated Book of Illusions is a haunting feat of intellectual gamesmanship. -- The New York Times

This noirish, layered tale will keep you guessing to the very end. -- Time Out New York

Author Bio
Paul Auster was born in New Jersey in 1947. After attending Columbia University he lived in France for four years. Since 1974 he has published poems, essays, novels, screenplays, and translations. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.