City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (New York Trilogy) [Paperback]

Paul Karasik (Adapter), David Mazzucchelli (Adapter), Paul Auster (Author), Art Spiegelman (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2004 | Series: New York Trilogy

A graphic novel classic with a new introduction by Art Spiegelman

Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a “post-existentialist private eye.” An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.

Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster’s groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (August 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312423608
• ISBN-13: 978-0312423605
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Mystery

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

I cannot possibly offer enough praise for David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik 's adaptation of City of Glass. While some critics found it to be a dry choice of books to turn into a comics, I think the interplay between image and text only heightens the original metafictional narrative. The treatment of the first speech by the crazy antagonist, Peter Stillman--in which the word balloons trail from random objects such as a broken television and a bottle of ink--is brilliant. Neon Lit: Paul Auster's City of Glass deftly illustrates why comics is a perfect format for exploring fictions about text: the words become visible objects of the story. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Karasik and Mazzucchelli's 1994 comics adaptation of Auster's existentialist mystery novel, reprinted here with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, has been a cult classic for years. The Comics Journal named it one of the 100 best comics of the century. Miraculously, it deepens the darkness and power of its source. Auster's novel (about a novelist named Quinn who's mistaken for a detective named Paul Auster and loses his mind and identity in the course of a meaningless case) zooms around in metafictional spirals, but it doesn't have a lot of visual content. In fact, it's mostly about the breakdown of the idea of representation and the widening chasm between signifier and signified. So the artists, perversely and brilliantly, play fast and loose with the text. Mazzucchelli draws everything in a bluntly sketched, bold-lined style, and having set up a suitably film noir mood at the beginning, he substitutes literal depictions of what's happening for symbolic or iconic images wherever possible. One character's monologue about the loss of meaning in his speech is drawn as a long zoom down his throat, followed by Charon arising from a void, a cave drawing, a series of holes and symbols of muteness and finally a broken marionette at the bottom of a well. This reflected, shattered Glass introduces a whole new set of resonances to Auster's story, about the things images can and can't represent when language fails.
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See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (August 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312423608
• ISBN-13: 978-0312423605
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #27,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Comics & Graphic Novels > Graphic Novels > Mystery

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional, Horrific and Beautiful Fiction March 23, 2006

By N8PM

Format:Paperback

City of Glass is the story of Daniel Quinn, a poet turned mystery writer, who is called one night by a person urgently seeking a detective. After several nights of "Sorry, wrong number," Quinn decides to impersonate Paul Auster, the detective the person wants to hire. Accepting the assignment leads to his ultimate ruin.

This story is primarily about Quinn's descent from depression into outright obsession and madness. Horrific abuse based on misinterpreted religion plays a big part in the book, as does the threat of murder. The perceived danger eventually disappears and the case fades away, but Quinn cannot return to his former life, and ends up completely delusional.

City of Glass is a book of unusual subtlety. Much of the tension is implicit, but is sensed through sections of extensive dialogue. The sparse artwork of the book, finally, highlights the dialogue by moving it along and filling it out, rather than distracting the reader from what is being said.

This is an exceptional work of fiction, even for readers unaccustomed to graphic novels.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant adaptation stands shoulder-to-shoulder with novel February 28, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

The real magic here is that, in reworking Paul Auster's original novel, Karasik and Mazzucchelli have done what so many had deemed impossible: they have produced a true literary adaptation in comics form. This is no "Classics Illustrated"; this is a comic that strengthens its source material rather than diminishing it. The original book's concern with the gap between language and meaning is given further depth and resonance in the comic, which finds a visual language equivalent, and does it in a way that no other medium could have. This is no mere illustrated text, but comics as a formidable language and medium in itself. Interestingly, when the original book and the comic are read together, the comic itself almost becomes a physical character, another in the story's proliferation of literary doubles.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pictures of some kind of Hell. . . . July 30, 2004

By Bruce Hutton

Format:Paperback

Having not read Paul Auster's original novel I can't compare it with the graphic novel, but I can certainly assume it must be an excellent book since it provided the source for this excellent work. I also can't say that I fully understand everything that goes on in this deceptively simple-looking little book; there are multiple layers, and the more times you read it the more questions it answers...and the more questions it asks.

A widower named Quinn lives in New York City with nothing to do but write detective novels. They fill the time, but they don't mean much to him. He walks around the city and likes to feel lost. He is so alone that his loneliness has actually become his companion. One night his phone rings: a wrong number. The caller wants something. He has no reason, but he goes along because it provides a direction, something he has been sorely lacking for years. He becomes involved in a case that has nothing to do with him and he lets it become an obsession. He imagines himself a detective, like the hero of his novels. He imagines that New York is his cocoon, protecting him from the real world, when actually it could be his Hell. He may be losing his mind.

Who is Quinn? Are the other characters in the novel parts of himself, or are they real? Is he looking for a reason to go insane, or is the world really this way? And what parts of Quinn belong to the novel's author, Paul Auster, who also appears in the novel? What is being said here about writing, about loneliness, about language, about growing old, about families, about faith? Questions upon questions. Some are answered in repeated readings, some are never answered. They are for you....

An absolutely mind-boggling piece of work with a thrilling story, a deeply personal perspective, and wonderfully evocative images that at once recall old Bogart films, nightmares, and great comics from the past. I wish more artists would attempt what Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli did here: not merely to translate, but to re-imagine a novel into an entirely new form. Bravo! Read more ›

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars William Wilson October 17, 2008

By Whirledtraveler

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

In all the reviews I am surprised no one has mentioned Poe's short story "William Wilson," the very definition of doppleganger in literary prose. Here in "City of Glass' we have the same thing, even Auster uses the name William Wilson.

This novel brings back true literature in a culture devoid of anything that smacks of indepth thinking on the part of the reader. Allusions, allegory, symbol, puns, linguistic twists, irony, shifting narrators...it's all here. The play on initials between Don Quixote and Danial Quinn is exquisite; the continual movement of Stillman and the paradox of his name speaks volumes about the craft of the author; the quick syntax of detective fiction when Quinn is Auster is beautifully reminiscent of Phillip Roth; the Socratic philosophical dialogue between Stillman and Auster makes me smile with joy that an author encapsulated the form so subtlely and let the audience 'get it' on their own.

As a reader, the beauty of the style and form shines through without me having to be told by the author what he is doing. That is priceless in a contemporary literary world where stunted, choppy, rough prose has eclipsed mastery. I am so glad I have a copy of City of Glass; it is the best book I have read in years.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Must have companion piece to The New York Trilogy July 14, 2006

By Andrij W. Zip

Format:Paperback

If you enjoyed (or more likely were haunted by) City of Glass then you owe it to yourself to read this graphic novel. Yes, it is essentially the exact same story as Auster's metaphysical detective novella. However, this is a fascinating and beautifully rendered interpretation of the source work. My only complaint: where are the graphic novels for Ghosts and The Locked Room?