Collected Novels Volume 2

In The Music of Chance, the story of Jim Nashe and Jack Pozzi, Auster evokes the strong European influences of Beckett and Kafka in a brilliant and unsettling parable of loss and gambling. In Leviathan, he makes perhaps his most direct attempt at exploring the political reality of contemporary American life, through the figure of Peter Aaron and his challenge to the complacency of modern life. Finally, in Mr Vertigo Auster crafts a cautionary tale of greed and exploitation in the story of Walt, the irrepressible orphan from the Mid-West, who learns the art of levitation under the tutelage of Master Yehudi. Highly varied, yet instantly recognisable as the work of the same storyteller, these three novels form the next chapter in the ongoing career of one of America's most enduring and fascinating writers.