Moon Palace

by Paul Auster

Overview

A “beautiful and haunting” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel of an orphan’s search for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his fate, from New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster

“Auster is a master storyteller . . . Moon Palace shimmers with mysteries.”—The Washington Post Book World

Marco Stanley Fogg is an orphan, a child of the sixties, a quester tirelessly seeking the key to his past, the answers to the ultimate riddle of his fate. As Marco journeys from the canyons of Manhattan to the deserts of Utah, he encounters a gallery of characters and a series of events as rich and surprising as any in modern fiction.
 
Beginning during the summer that men first walked on the moon, and from there moving backward and forward in time to span three generations, Moon Palace is propelled by coincidence and memory, illuminated by marvelous flights of lyricism and wit. Here is an entertaining and moving novel from an author well known for his breathtaking imagination.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140115857
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/01/1990
Series:	Contemporary American Fiction Series
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	78,720
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Paul Auster was the bestselling author of 4 3 2 1, Sunset Park, The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. His other honors include the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Burning Boy, and the Carlos Fuentes Prize for his body of work. His novel 4 3 2 1 was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Paul Auster died in 2024.

Hometown:

Brooklyn, New York

Date of Birth:

February 3, 1947

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A., M.A., Columbia University, 1970

What People are Saying About This

Don DeLillo

This is a writer who work shines with intelligence and originality....He blends modern surfaces with 19th century interiors....Yet he puts his storytelling techniques at the service of a very contemporary novel.

Editorial Reviews

Auster is a masterly storyteller . . . Moon Palace shimmers with mysteries.”—The Washington Post Book World
 
“Enormously compelling . . . Auster has a rare combination of talent, scope, and audacity.”—The New Republic
 
“Good hearted and hopeful, verbally exuberant.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Reads like a composite of works by Fielding, Dickens, and Twain . . . Auster has a lot of fun concocting Marco’s adventures, almost has much fun as one has in reading them.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Praise for Paul Auster:

“One of the great American prose stylists of our time.”—New York Times

“Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter.”—New York Review of Books

“One of the great writers of our time.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Contemporary American writing at its best.”—New York Times Book Review, on Invisible

“A literary original who is perfecting a hybrid genre of his own.”—The Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher

The moon as a poetic and planetary influence over earthly affairs runs as a theme, wittily ransacked, throughout this elegant fiction by award-winning novelist and poet Auster. Marco Fogg is a loner and a dreamer, whose ``mind is on the moon,'' and who in a state of elation unfolds moonlore to his friends. The year of the moon landing finds Fogg living in spartan reclusivity until forced from his New York apartment to roam as a Central Park vagrant. His rescue by Kitty Wu, a gentle Chinese girl, leads to their poignant and tenuous love. Like some of Auster's earlier protagonists, Fogg senses he has a kindred, submerged or vanished other self. Here, it is Fogg's father, who went into eclipse before his birth; the quest for the parent forms a narrative thread. When Fogg serves as reader/companion to the elderly cripple Barber, aka ``Effing,'' who recounts his adventures in a Western wilderness where he buried a cache of paintings, Fogg's fate takes an unexpected turn.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The novel's fantastic quality can be hard to swallow, and some of the action is maddeningly distant, but it's interesting, worthwhile reading. -- Library Journal

Library Journal - Grimm

Moon Palace is a richly textured fairy tale which is his most sustained and powerful work to date. . . . The story is told in regulated, measured prose, sufficiently flexible to accommodate, at certain moments, an emotional intensity which Auster has not achieved in his fiction before. . . . [The book] becomes a semi-nostalgic epitaph for the lost innocence of the 1960s American dream, when a young man could still get west, chastened by his voyage through the vast empty wilderness, and declare that 'this is where my life begins'. -- The New Statesman

Allon Reich