JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 146.201.208.22 on Wed, 07 Oct 2015 18:33:28 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditionsan interview with PAUL AUSTER Conducted by Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory t first glance, Paul Auster's literary career seems to have two distinct phases: first, a period during the 1970s and early 1980s when Auster was a respected but little known editor, critic, translator, and poet, and then the more recent phase-launched by the popular and critical success of his mid-eighties New York Trilogy-as a prolific novelist. But as in his fiction, the actual state of affairs is considerably more complex. As Auster explains in the following interviewbegun in his Brooklyn home in the spring of 1989 and continued through several telephone conversations-these two phases in his career are intertwined, not only in terms of style and subject matter but also because he was writing fiction all during the earlier period when he was publishing poems, essays, and translations. Indeed, all three of his most recent novels (In the Country of Last Things [1987], Moon Palace [1989], and The Music of Chance [1990]) were begun early on in his career-earlier even than his first published novels making up The New York Trilogy (City of Glass [1985], Ghosts [1986], and The Locked Room [1986]). After attending Columbia University in the late 1960s, Auster spent four years in France, translating and writing. When he returned to the United States he participated in numerous literary projects: he edited The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry; translated the works of Joseph Joubert, Jacques Dupin, Brief excerpts from this interview are also included in an additional part of our conversation with Auster that appears as 'An Interview with Paul Auster," Mississippi Review: Interview Issue 20.1-2 (1991): 49-62. Contemporary Literature XXXIII, 1 0010-7484/92/0001-0001 $1.50