Books like Day/Night by Paul Auster

Day/Night brings together Paul Auster’s two metaphysical novels—Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark—meant to be read together. In the first, an elderly Mr. Blank awakens in an unfamiliar cell, his memory gone, and must piece together his identity from the limited objects around him and the visitors who appear in his day. In the second, an older man named August Brill, suffering from insomnia, is trapped in the relentless cycle of painful memories and imagined possibilities. Auster uses these parallel narratives to examine philosophical questions about reality, self, and the interplay between the political and the personal, while probing the psychological struggle of coping with great loss. The two works are small yet powerful studies in how the mind negotiates existence, confronting the boundary between waking and sleep, memory and imagination, and the possibility of escape from inner confinement.

First publish date: 2013