Paul Auster’s Lost Children’s Book

The NY Observer solved a minor BEA mystery involving Paul Auster and a lost children’s book.

Last week at BEA, Granta‘s newly-appointed acting editor, John Freeman, interviewed novelists Olga Grushin, Sherman Alexie, and Auster to celebrate the literary journal’s new fiction issue. During the proceedings, a number of audience members said they had seen a children’s book version of Auster’s novel, “Timbuktu”–but the author and his agent didn’t know about the book.

Yesterday, the matter was finally resolved–the book indeed exists. Auster’s agent, Carol Mann, explained in the article: “‘It was a labor of love by a German packager-publisher, and they came to us with illustrations and an abridgement and then they disappeared. We had looked at it–Paul completely forgot about it but he had seen it, we both had. Apparently this little company’s computer server went down and the computer crashed so all of our back and forth was lost.’”

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