The Red Notebook: True Stories Read online

  Editor

  The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry • I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project

  Translations

  Fits And Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin • The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of André du Bouchet • The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert • A Tomb for Anatole (Stéphane Mallarmé) • On the High Wire (Philippe Petit) • Vicious Circles (Maurice Blanchot) • Translations • Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (Pierre Clastres)

  Copyright © 1992, 1995, 2000, 2002 by Paul Auster

  Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines in which the pieces of this collection originally appeared: Granta (“The Red Notebook” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing”); The New Yorker (“Why Write?”); and Conjunctions (“Accident Report”).

  Book design by Erik Rieselbach

  First published as New Directions Paperbook 924 in 2002

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Canada Books, Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Auster, Paul, 1947-

  The red notebook : (true stories) / by Paul Auster.

  p. cm. — (New Directions paperbook ; 924)

  eISBN 978-0-8112-2115-3

  I. Title.

  PS355I.U77 R43 2002

  813’.54—dc21 2002001926

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  SEVENTH PRINTING