Paul Auster's The New York trilogy : City of glass, Ghosts, The locked room : the graphic adaptation / by Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti ; David Mazzucchelli.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his deeply beloved series, The New York Trilogy , a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction.

In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. B ut City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's acclaimed New York Trilogy , and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics.

Now the wait is over.

The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass , an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist's downfall. And in The Locked Room , another author is experiencing writer's block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel.

Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster's sophisticated wordplay and translate it into comicsplay: both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Karasik (How To Read Nancy) is joined by two exemplary illustrators in this adaptation of the three interlinked metafictional mystery novels that make up the late Auster's (1947--2024) celebrated "New York Trilogy." In City of Glass, Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (Asterios Polyp) team to tell the story of Quinn, a reclusive writer who, after being mistaken for a private detective, is drawn into a mystery that threatens his grip on reality. Mazzuchelli's skillful illustration, favoring geometric compositions and surreal imagery, powerfully evoke Quinn's isolation and steadily unraveling psyche throughout. Illustrator Lorenzo Mattotti's (Garlandia) textured, painterly pencil line and bold contrasting of light and shadow lend an eerie intimacy to Ghosts, the story of a private investigator named Blue who is hired by a man named White to tail and surveil an enigmatic man named Black. Karasik serves as author and illustrator for The Locked Room. Here, an unnamed writer tasked with managing the unpublished manuscripts of a man named Fanshawe, after his sudden disappearance, becomes equal parts envious and contemplative about the nature of creation and authorship. VERDICT An immersive and innovative adaptation, blending exhilaratingly experimental storytelling, tropes and an atmosphere drawn from the noir genre, metafiction, and philosophical musings about art and identity.

Publishers Weekly Review

This spectacular graphic adaptation of Auster's postmodern trilogy, cowritten by Paul Karasik (How to Read Nancy), unites three tales of lonely men seeking meaning into a distilled portrait of the haunted urban soul. The volume opens with a reissue of David Mazzucchelli and Karasik's 1994 version of City of Glass. New to this edition are Ghosts, drawn by New Yorker cover artist Lorenzo Mattotti (The Crackle of the Frost), and The Locked Room, drawn by Karasik. Quinn, the protagonist of City of Glass, is a widower who writes PI mysteries under a pseudonym, and he sees himself as a "ventriloquist dummy" in this "triad of selves." Mistakenly hired as a PI, Quinn tracks a mad academic whose study of language sends him down an exegetical vortex. In Ghosts, where the art has a more spectral, brushed look and an illustrated novel layout, another metaphysical detective story plays out when investigator Blue is hired by a mysterious man named White to trail a man named Black--who does nothing but read Thoreau and write. It's a bleak puzzle that could keep a lycée's worth of French semioticians happy for a decade. The Locked Room's art style is more subdued. What initially seems to be a simple tale about a man reconnecting with a childhood friend evolves into an existential revelation, with the narrator declaring that life is just "random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose." This long-anticipated volume was well worth the wait. Agents: (for Auster) Carol Mann, Carol Mann Agency; (for Karasik, Mattotti, and Mazzucchelli) Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

It's been over three decades since Paul Auster's City of Glass was first published; the wry, stylish graphic adaptation of Auster's postmodern detective story became a critical darling among literary comics fans. Now, the subsequent two stories in Auster's New York Trilogy are finally here in this volume collecting all three stories together. Each of the three stories have very different styles and textures; "Ghosts" features spare, quiet illustrations in smudgy graphite paired with paragraphs of typewriter-like text, while "The Locked Room" is more traditional in its format, with paneled pages and speech-balloon dialogue. While neither of the new stories quite manages to capture the verve that made "City of Glass" such a critical success, readers who appreciated the first story's internally coiling narrative and meditation on the slipperiness of identity, language, and the role of the author will find much of the same in the other two stories. Fans of literary fiction who appreciate high-concept narratives in unconventional formats will be the best audience for this thought-provoking, artful collection.

Kirkus Book Review

Following the acclaimed 1994 graphic-novel adaptation ofCity of Glass, adaptations of the remaining books in Auster's experimental noir trilogy now join the first in this complete collection, each illustrated by a different artist: comics legend Mazzucchelli,New Yorker cover artist Mattotti, and cartoonist Karasik, who also art directed all three. InCity of Glass, a traumatized mystery writer finds himself playing detective. He becomes embroiled in a case involving a femme fatale and her deeply troubled husband, who had been inhumanely raised by a mad professor in an attempt to rediscover "God's language."Ghosts--presented mostly in picture-book format (one large image above a chunk of text) rather than the sequential panels of the other two stories--follows a private investigator who stakes out the apartment of a man who seems to do little other than write and read. As the investigator (named "Blue"--all characters' names are colors) compiles reports of his mundane observations, he comes to question exactly who is observing whom. InThe Locked Room, a hack writer inherits the literary legacy (and wife and child) of his vanished and exceptional childhood friend, attaining a blissful life--until he can't resist trying to track down the friend, who forbids being found on penalty of death. Themes of identity run through the books, as do literary references and contemplations on the writerly life--particularly the idea that a writer does not have a life of his own. ("Paul Auster" also appears as a character.) The stories resist easy interpretation, but opaque moments, like characters' descents into madness or explanations of complex theories, receive rich visualization from the talented trio of artists: Mazzucchelli's crisp, confident lines; Mattotti's sumptuous shading; and Karasik's inventive paneling. An engrossing marriage of literature and pulp. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.