Lewis Mumford Lecture: City of Words

The Graduate Program in Urban Design School of Architecture, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture City College of New York is pleased to announce the sixth annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism.

Paul Auster: City of Words

Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 6pm at The Great Hall of Shepard Hall, CCNY
Convent Avenue at 138th Street, New York, NY

The lecture is free and open to the public. No reservations are necessary.



From the CUNY Newswire:

“Paul Auster is the quintessential urban novelist. His novels are about different ways of reading the city and different ways in which urban spaces can be characterized,” said Michael Sorkin, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at CCNY, who organizes the lecture series.

Professor Sorkin noted that Mr. Auster’s novels are “amazing popular among architects. There is something in his writing that speaks to the way architects formulate space.”

About Paul Auster

Mr. Auster is the author of 15 novels, five screenplays and published essays, memoirs and autobiographies. He has edited several collections and translated works into English, as well. The “Times Literary Supplement” called him “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”

His novels include: “Man in the Dark” (2008), “Travels in the Scriptorium” (2007), “The Brooklyn Follies” (2005), “Oracle Night” (2004), “The Book of Illusions” (2004), “Timbuktu” (1999), “Mr. Vertigo” (1994), “Leviathan” (1992), “The Music of Chance” (1990), “Moon Palace” (1989), “In the Country of Last Things” (1987), and the three novels known as “The New York Trilogy:” “City of Glass” (1985), “Ghosts” (1986) and “The Locked Room” (1986).

Among his screenplays are: “The Inner Life of Martin Frost” (2007), “Lulu on the Bridge” (1998), “Smoke” (1995) and “Blue in the Face” (1995). He also directed the first two. Mr. Auster won the Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay and the Silver Bear from the Berlin Film Festival for “Smoke.” “Lulu on the Bridge” was an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival.

His nonfiction works include: “Hand to Mouth” (1997), “The Red Notebook” (1995), “The Art of Hunger” (1992) and “The Invention of Solitude” (1982). They were collected for the first time in the Picador Paperback Original “Collected Prose” (2005).

Mr. Auster edited and introduced the national bestseller “I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project” (Picador, 2002) and edited “The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry.” He also edited “Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition” (2006).

In 2006, Paul Auster was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won the Premio Principe de Asturias de las Letras, Spain’s most prestigious prize for literature. Among his other awards are the Commandur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Prix Médicis for the best foreign novel published in France (1992) and the Morton Dauwen Zabel award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990).

Mr. Auster lives with his wife, the writer Siri Hustvedt, in Brooklyn. His next novel, “Invisible”, will be published in November 2009.