praise for the imaginative power of his many novels, including The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, Mr. Vertigo, and Timbuktu. He has also published a number of highly original non-fiction works: The Invention of Solitude, Hand to Mouth, and The Art of Hunger. In The Red Notebook, Auster again explores events from the real world large and small, tragic and comic--that reveal the unpredictable, shifting nature of human experience. A burnt onion pie, a wrong number, a young boy struck by lightning, a man falling off a roof, a scrap of paper discovered in a Paris hotel room--all these form the context for a singular kind of ars poetica, a literary manifesto without theory, cast in the irreducible forms of pure story telling.