Postponed — White Spaces: A Reading and Signing with Paul Auster

This event has been postponed. We will update this page and contact ticket holders when new information is available. If you have any questions in the meantime, please email us at [email protected].

In an intimate, pared-down evening with the renowned author, Paul Auster will read for forty-five minutes from his latest collection White Spaces: Selected Poems and Early Prose (New Directions), followed by an extended signing.

White Spaces gathers the poetry and prose of Paul Auster from various small-press books issued throughout the seventies. These early poetic works are crucial for understanding the evolution of Auster’s writing. Taut, lyrical, and always informed by a powerful and subtle music, his poems begin with basics―a swallow’s egg, stones, roots, thistle, “the glacial rose”―and push language to the breaking point. As Robert Creeley wrote, “The enduring power of these early poems is their moving address to a world all too elusive, too fragmented, and too bitterly transient.” Auster’s poems are grounded in a physical utterance that is at once an exploration of the mind and of the world. This collection begins with compact verse fragments from Spokes (originally published in Poetry, 1971) and goes through Auster’s marvelous later collections including Wall Writing (The Figures, 1976), Facing the Music (Parenthese, 1979), and White Spaces (Station Hill, 1980).