Seven Stories Press has acquired world rights to Jennifer Bartlett’s The Mechanics of Reality, the authorised biography of Paul Auster, who died on April 30, 2024. The book will include considerable archival material from Auster’s personal papers and photographs not yet made public.
October 5, 2026—Dan Simon, publisher of Seven Stories Press, has announced the acquisition of the authorised biography of Paul Auster, The Mechanics of Reality: Paul Auster’s Life and Work, by the poet and biographer Jennifer Bartlett through literary agent Jessica Craig of Craig Literary. The forthcoming book, currently scheduled for Autumn 2029, has the full support of Auster’s widow and literary executor, the internationally recognised novelist and scholar Siri Hustvedt, whose memoir of her life with Auster, Ghost Stories, topped bestseller lists all over Europe in the spring. It will be published simultaneously in the US and the UK.
“Paul Auster was one of the few American masters who straddled the 20th and 21st centuries,” said Dan Simon. “I believe in Jennifer Bartlett and the kind of ambition she has to write the biography that will bring together all the different parts of Paul’s life and work and give him the assessment we all know he deserves.”
The biography will encompass Auster’s first marriage to the writer and translator Lydia Davis, his long second marriage to Siri Hustvedt, his intimate relationship with his daughter, the singer song-writer Sophie Auster, and her husband, the photographer Spencer Ostrander, with whom he collaborated on three books, and the tragedy of Davis and Auster’s son, Daniel. Before he died, Auster made it clear to Hustvedt that he wanted Daniel’s story to be told. He was hurt and outraged by the media sensationalism that surrounded Daniel, much of which was distorted and some of which was false.
Hustvedt has connected Bartlett to their friends including Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Peter Newman, Wim and Donata Wenders, Don DeLillo and Barbara Bennett, Jim Jarmusch and Sara Driver, Joyce Carol Oates, Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly. The book will include interviews with Paul’s agent for over four decades, Carol Mann, his three assistants, and the lawyer who handled Daniel Auster’s 1996 legal case.