Paul Auster: Burning Boy

Paul Auster is a true giant of contemporary literature. Acclaimed for his best-selling works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, including The New York Trilogy, Invisible, and The Brooklyn Follies, Auster writes complex and daring tales of humans experiencing, anticipating or searching for something lost, something they are struggling to comprehend.

In his newest book, Burning Boy, he turns his eye to the 19th-century bad boy of American literature, Stephen Crane. Crane is known for popularising American naturalism, a literary movement that has influenced generations of writers (including Auster himself). But he was as daring off the page as he was on it.

Throughout his short life, Crane cavorted from one high-stakes situation to the next: from engaging in political journalism that disrupted the course of the 1892 presidential campaign, to entering a common-law marriage with the proprietress of Jacksonville’s most elegant bawdyhouse, to surviving a shipwreck that nearly drowned him, and eventually relocating to England, where Joseph Conrad became his closest friend and Henry James wept over his tragic, early death.

Join Auster and host Corrie Perkin for a conversation about Burning Boy and the nature of creative legacy. What are the questions one master chooses to ask of another? And what is there to learn from a life lived so bright it burned?

The online bookseller for this event is Hill of Content

This event takes place online and is available on demand from Wednesday 3 November  6.30pm AEDT, until Wednesday 10 November 6.30pm AEDT.

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