In this astonishingly acrobatic work, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature--or art--through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Laura Riding, Knut Hamsun, John Ashbery, and other vital figures of our century. In one piece he considers Georges Cataille's befief that "a moment of rage" is behind all great works; in another, he sees the legendary highwire artist Philippe Petit as a gellow practitioner "of an art of solitude, a way of coming to grips with one's life in the darkest, most secret coner of the self." In a section of interviews as well as in the revelatory "The Red Notebook", Auster reflects on his own work: on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing; on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Art of Hunger undermines and illuminates our accepted notions about literature, and leads us to a better understanding of the dangerous stakes of writing.
"A beautiful, furious erudition...a will-led tour through the landscape of a sensibility" - St. Louis Post Dispatch