"Probably Auster's best novel."-Kirkus, starred
review
"Astute and mesmerizing."-Booklist, starred review
"This best-selling author with a cult following of literati
finally offers one to please both fan bases."-Library Journal,
starred review
"This is perhaps Auster's best book. But maybe that's an unfair
description. Man In The Dark is so unlike anything Auster
has ever written that it doesn't make sense to compare it with his
earlier work. Sure, you can recognize the author of 'Oracle Night'
and 'Brooklyn Follies.' But it's as if that gentle mind has been
joined by the ghost of Kurt Vonnegut, the adamant pacifist, author
of 'Slaughterhouse Five' and creator of Billy Pilgrim, a prisoner
of war who became 'unstuck in time.' Here we have multiple worlds
and three generations, also unstuck in time. But like Vonnegut's
classic anti-war novel, Auster's book leaves one with a depth of
feeling much larger than might be expected from such a small and
concise work of art."-Stephen Elliott, San Francisco
Chronicle
"In one thread, an ailing 72-year-old named Brill convalesces in
Vermont; in the parallel and more eventful thread, a man named
Brick wakes up in a dangerous dream-America currently in the middle
of a 21st-century civil war. Both plots are propulsive. . . .
[Auster is] a master of voice, an avuncular confidence man who can
spin dark stories out of air."-Entertainment Weekly
"[Auster's] magic has never flourished more fully than it does
in Man In The Dark. . . . The novel delivers intense
reading pleasure from start to finish."-Chauncey Mabe, Orlando
Sentinel
"Vivid and arresting. . . . a novel that manages, admirably, to
be both apocalyptic and tender. . . . The universe conceived by
Auster is a world worth entering. And all that Brill struggles to
forget in the pages of Man In The Dark translates into a
book that deserves to be well remembered."-St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
"Auster is after something entirely different, in this haunting
and beautifully crafted work, than speculative fiction. . . . This
superb small novel isn't, despite initial impressions, about war or
politics at all. It is about, in the face of guilt and horror,
choosing whether to die and how, if that is the choice, to live. It
is, at heart, about the stratagems that we, but in particular our
best novelists, devise as a means of keeping us going in the face
of the 'pitiless dark' that will swallow us
all."-Popmatters.com
"Man In The Dark . . . crashes onto shore with a great
burst. It suddenly adds up, and what it adds up to can leave you
sleepless."-The Buffalo News
"[A] fascinating new novel. . . . As Auster reminds us, often
the worst wars are those fought in one's own mind."-MSNBC.com
"Paul Auster's twisty Man In The Dark concerns an
alternate universe where two planes never toppled the World Trade
Center. But Bush is still president, and a civil war rages in
America. . . . Takes us closer to understanding the emotional
wreckage [of 9/11]."-GQ
"The real magician here is Auster. Our new century so far has
been as bleak and troubled as Brill's last years. This little dream
of a novel invests it with something newly precious. Hope riffles
the pages of this beautiful, heartbreaking
book."-Paste
"No writer is working harder than Auster to give America an
existential literature to call its own, and Brill has a ruminative
and slightly despairing mood that recalls Camus' antiheros. Yet
Man In The Dark isn't a headlong leap into emptiness . . .
Auster treats the theme of isolation straightforwardly, studying
the emotional costs of war through Brill's own vivid memories and
his family's own recent heartbreak. In the process, he arrives at
the provocative notion that war stories and love stories aren't as
different as we might like to think."-Washington City
Paper