AUSTER AFTERNOONS.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-JAN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"Isn't there supposed to be a reading here in about twenty minutes?" I asked. . . . "It was cancelled," the bartender said. "With all that slop out there today, there wouldn't have been much point to it. Poetry's a beautiful thing, but it's hardly worth freezing your ass off for."

This interchange takes place early in Paul Auster's novel "Leviathan." As his readers know, many small happenings in his novels have an uncanny prescience about them; and this one in particular seemed likely to be confirmed by reality the other day, when the first blizzard of winter blew in, muffling...

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