Rating: 
Summary: Too Complicated and Sophisticated
Review: The book tries to be too smart while it isn't. It wants to become a sophisticated literature game but it fails. I liked other Auster's books (Music of Chance,Vertigo, The Book of Illusions) but you just can't love that book because you understand it only partly and you can't like the characters.
Rating: 
Summary: A must-have book!
Review: I purchased this book through Amazon.com right after another great purchase, THE LOSERS' CLUB by Richard Perez, about an unlucky writer addicted to the personals. Both books are about New York City, but that's where the similarity ends.The collection begins with "City of Glass", in which Quinn, a writer of detective stories, receives a phone call inquiring after the detective Paul Auster. Curious, Quinn decides to pose as Auster, and gets drawn into a mystery involving a psychotic father trying to find and kill his son. Taken in by the father, fascinated by his way of thinking, Quinn loses track of the mystery and begins to inhabit a solipsistic world of his own invention. Then comes "Ghosts", an elegantly constructed, tragic story that stabs like a knife. A detective's protege is asked to spy on another man; it's arranged that the protege will inhabit the apartment opposite that of the man he's been asked to watch, and that he'll be paid for this. As the days and weeks go by, the protege realizes that a cruel trick has been played on him; by the end of the story, all expectations, and the roles of the characters, have completely reversed themselves. Finally "The Locked Room", in which the narrator is asked to edit the complete works of his old friend Fanshawe, a previously-undiscovered writer whom the narrator hasn't seen in years. By the end of the story, the editor - and the reader - realizes that Fanshawe's identity is fluid, to say the least. So, what to make of these stories? They're unbelievably compelling, just like traditional detective stories. Their plots, from a description, might sound too weird to be of any interest to a general reader - but the truth is that they start out in the vein of any mystery novel, and gradually move into the more exotic terrain of the relations between detective and mystery. The subplot presented to us in "City of Glass" - the writer being drawn into his own mystery - is analogous to the situations of the other characters in the other novellas.
Rating: 
Summary: the emperor has no clothes
Review: Somewhere along the way Paul Auster was decreed a "literary author," so if you dare to say he's boring, pretentious, and not really all that good with words, you are simply one of the great unwashed who don't get it. The first two novels in this book book are flat our lousy, no two ways about it (I lost the book after the I slogged through the second novel and didn't much miss it. The concluding story looked better than the other two but that ain't saying much). Auster's characters are wan bloodless abstractions. You can have abstractions in your stories and still write engaging stuff, look at Kafka, but make us feel for your abstractions; that's the secret. Auster doesn't come close to managing this feat. Auster writes "literature" for philosophy students who never got literature or maybe "philosophy" for English students who never understood philosophy. At any rate it's boring and self important drivel, worse when you get down to it Mr. Auster's great insights are really rather insipid. They're the kinds of things fifteen year olds happen on and feel really, really deep and special for thinking of, for a year or two anyway. James Ellroy and Dashiell Hammett have written much better books, but unfortunately they're crime authors so we can't take them seriously now can we? But Mr. Auster, talentless though he may be, is a literary author, deigning to write crime albeit in an oh so clever postmodern way so we can't not him serioulsly at risk of looking dumb. If you read to actually enjoy a book pick up Ellroy or Hammett, but if you want to impress the grad student crowd at parties then go for Auster. But you'll always wonder just how many of them actually like him, and how many are just saying they do are because they're too afraid of looking stupid to say differently.
Rating:
Summary: The best trilogy ever
Review: The three different stories are all dark and thrilling psychologically. The style is fluid and intense. A real pleasure for the ones who like to avoid the regular "happy ending" novels.
Rating: 
Summary: the power of words...............
Review: New York Trilogy is series of three novellas that take place in NYC. The stories are detective style tales, where people are searching for missing aspects of their lives. While each story is interesting in and of itself, the most intriguing aspect was the word play and the word "games" that Paul Austere packs into his stories. Each tale leaves you hanging just a little and thinking about critical meanings of words and ideas, identity, self, reality and the connections between them. This is not light reading, but it is interesting. It is not until the final page where the interplay of the stories begins to unlock itself to the reader and the brilliance of this work begins to glow.
Rating:
Summary: Auster¿s darkly delightful, experimental detective series
Review: Paul Auster burst onto the literary scene in the mid-eighties with The New York Trilogy, a series of experimental detective novels (or should I say detective-style novels as only one features an actual detective). In the first installment, City of Glass, a wrong number draws a hermetic novelist into mentally disturbed man's conflict with his religious fanatic father. In the next, Ghosts, a private eye named Blue is hired by a man called White to spy on the isolated Black. In the final episode, The Locked Room, a literary critic searches for a childhood friend who has disappeared, leaving behind a wife and child and a wealth of extraordinary, unpublished fiction. After each tale's somewhat cryptic ending, the truths behind the shady events are still mostly obscure and so is the piece's general meaning. Both of which are especially disappointing given the amount of suspense Auster builds-up. The author is often accused of being clever for clever's sake and is easy to understand why. But if those are your concerns, you are missing what makes these books truly special: atmosphere. Mixing detective noir with postmodern surrealism, Auster paints eerie netherlands that make the reader readily accept the most bizarre circumstances in his fiction. Everything the New York Trilogy lacks in substance, it more than makes up for in style.
Rating:
Summary: Add to the permanent collection
Review: This book has the rare combination of qualities that qualify it as re-readable. There is enough fibre to it to allow digestion to occur over a long period of time, and each reading will reveal new perspectives.
If at first you're confused and think you've stumbled onto some sort of high-art form of detective novels, you've basically got the right idea. Fortunately, Auster goes much deeper, weaving an intricate and complex thread throughout the stories of this trilogy. Though each can stand on the strength of its tale on its own, together they form a triptych which forces you as the reader to continually refer to each portion again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Pretentious, weird, and I'm fairly certain brilliant
Review: This is one of the strangest books, actually three short novellas, that I've ever read. It's almost like a university-sponsored experiment in avante garde literature...no traditional beginning-middle-end structure, no formulaic plotline, no standard 'protagonist' and 'antagonist' characters, odd, stilted dialog, difficult to figure allegory, etc...all of the rules are broken here. It communicates on a bizarre, almost visceral level that is hard to describe, almost as if Auster creates a seperate reality that makes sense as you're reading it and later confuses the hell out of you when you stop and think about it. I couldn't really say that I "enjoyed" this book, honestly it kind of gave me 'the willies', but I keep a copy in my collection because it is just so odd, so amazingly unique and quite probably the work of a bona-fide genius. I have never read anything quite like this.
Rating:
Summary: Surveillance of the self
Review: If you're looking for detective stories, look elsewhere. Auster isn't interested in the classic noirish private eye tale as anything but a way into territory vastly more compelling. Though his three novellas ostensibly revolve around men hired or driven into the pursuit of others, they end up being more about the psychology of the pursuer than the pursued. Surveillance of the self and the collapse of what we assume is our own identity is the abiding theme here, and Auster gives it three fascinating spins with simple plots which quickly spiral to literary altitudes. But don't expect simple resolutions. There are no straightforward answers here. If these were simple issues, they wouldn't justify the exploration Auster gives them. I had the pleasure of reading this immediately prior to Auster's "The Art of Hunger" (1997), a collection of essays and interviews which reveals, among other things, how "The New York Trilogy" blends aspects of his autobiography, literary theories and abiding interests into a fascinating work of fiction. Read them together. Then read everything else he's written. You won't be disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: detached perspective on the world
Review: The stories are well written, easy to follow and maintain a consistent flow. Which is all very commendable because this is difficult to do. But the greatness stops there. The characters are likeable enough, but for some reason, I did not care about them. I can not explain why either. Gradually, I just lost interest. Perhaps it was because of the style of the author. Possibly, the text is too perfect. By that I mean that it lacks passion, energy and --- elan -- or something. Again, I can not put my finger on. Auster seems to be like a voyeuristic, transcendent being, detached from the world, watching things from above, simply recording events like a court reporter...... I really wanted to like this book. I just couldn't.
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