This person would be old enough to read it without the filter of a parent and to understand how wonderful and imaginative and absolutely crazy it is. In contrast to Robert Coover, he doesn’t just exploit genre conventions to house a story or myth he has invented. By the time I was done with his work I started investigating his life and realised how deeply fascinating that was. It was Whitman's "mettlesome, mad, extravagant city", the city of Cornelius Vanderbilt and Stanford White.

You will see lots of hard-talking tough guys in gray suits and gray hats running around city streets socking one another in the jaw and plugging one another with bullets -- plenty of action to be sure.I was thinking of starting off this review the same way, given that this book leaves you wondering about everything, but thinking about that as an option makes it also dishonest, because I would know where to start with this review.

In his little speech to Alice, Humpty Dumpty sketches the future of human hopes and gives the clue to our salvation: to become masters of the words we speak, to make language answer our needs. A 2006 reissue by Penguin Books is fronted by new pulp magazine-style covers by comic book illustrator Art Spiegelman. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. But even if we don’t have an objective we seek and quest anyway because we want to penetrate into the future.Known for his elegant, lapidary novels – The New York Trilogy and Moon Palace are more than 30 years old now – Auster’s later career has seen him in more expansive form. Perhaps the author doesn’t really exist outside the work of fiction, in that they vanish and become someone else when they’re not writing. But for me, this is exactly the kind of book I love to stumble upon: one that surprises, and that seeks new and unconventional paths to expression. The postmodernist heart of the trilogy’s obsession with identity and legitimacy extends even beyond the book’s publication. In this story, the detective works closely with the author, Paul Auster, who may or may not be real; the character has a hard time remembering where the lines of reality are.