City of Glass

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. Miraculously, it deepens the darkness and power of its source. City of Glass, the first part of Paul Auster's seminal work, The New York Trilogy, is perhaps the quintessential Auster story—an exploration of identity and language, whose narrative is kick-started by a random act of chance: "It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not." In the expert hands of David Mazzuchelli, Paul Karasik, and Art Spiegelman, Auster's dark and brilliant spin on the detective story has been given a unique and unexpected new life.