By Coral Gables Gazette staff
Paul Auster told his wife he wanted to return as a ghost. He died on April 30, 2024, at 77, from complications of lung cancer — exactly one year before the anniversary that falls this week. The book his wife has written in the year since is called Ghost Stories, and it honors that desire with the kind of unflinching intimacy that only forty-three years of shared life can produce.
Siri Hustvedt will discuss Ghost Stories at Books & Books Coral Gables, 265 Aragon Avenue, on Thursday, May 7, at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase. Seating is not guaranteed — arrive early. The conversation will be moderated by Mitchell Kaplan, Books & Books founder and co-founder of the Miami Book Fair, who knew both Auster and Hustvedt personally and co-founded the writers’ organization Writers for Democratic Action with them.
The book and what it contains
Ghost Stories is published by Simon & Schuster at $30 and arrives as one of the most anticipated literary memoirs of the year — not only because of what Hustvedt has written but because of what the book contains. Auster left behind letters and notes to Hustvedt and an unfinished book addressed to his grandson Miles, born in 2024 to daughter Sophie Auster and her husband Spencer Ostrander. That unfinished book — Letters to Miles — appears in Ghost Stories in its incomplete form, making the memoir also a vessel for Auster’s last words.
The book is, as Hustvedt has described it, both an elegy and a reckoning. It explores how grief unmoors time, how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday long after one half of that life is gone, and how the body experiences the absence of love as a kind of presence. It bears witness not only to Auster’s death but to the deaths that preceded it — Hustvedt’s stepson and granddaughter, who died in 2022 — making Ghost Stories a chronicle of accumulated loss rather than a single bereavement.
Kirkus, in a starred notice, described the book as creating “a palpable portrait of Auster as lover and husband, father and grandfather” and noted that “their bond was physical, emotional, and deeply intellectual.” It is part memoir, part philosophical inquiry — Hustvedt holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, and her writing has always moved between literary and scientific registers. Ghost Stories does not abandon that range. It brings it to bear on the most personal subject she has ever written about.
The writer and her work
Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels, five essay collections, two works of nonfiction, and a book of poetry — a body of work that has made her one of the most intellectually ambitious writers of her generation. Her novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. What I Loved and The Summer Without Men were international bestsellers. Her awards include the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, the Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities, an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, and the Sigourney Award for expanding psychoanalytic thought. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
She and Auster were married for forty-three years. They lived in Brooklyn. They were a literary partnership as well as a marriage — two writers who read each other’s work, argued about ideas, and maintained parallel careers of extraordinary distinction. Auster’s own bibliography runs from The Invention of Solitude in 1982 through The New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, and his final novel Baumgartner, published shortly before his death. He was named a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by France, where his work was celebrated with particular intensity. He was, as his admirers called him, the dean of American postmodernism.
The moderator and his connection
Mitchell Kaplan opened the first Books & Books on Aragon Avenue in 1982 — the same year Auster published The Invention of Solitude and the same year Hustvedt arrived in New York to begin her doctoral work at Columbia. The parallel timelines are coincidental but fitting. Kaplan has been part of the literary ecosystem that sustained both writers for more than four decades, hosting them at the store and at the Miami Book Fair he co-founded in 1985.
The relationship between Kaplan and the Auster-Hustvedt household went beyond professional courtesy. Together they co-founded Writers for Democratic Action, an organization that continues presenting monthly programs for writers and readers. Kaplan received the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation in 2011. He has served as president of the American Booksellers Association and now serves on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship.
His presence as moderator on Thursday night is not incidental. He is among the people who knew Paul Auster as a friend, who knew this marriage from the outside over decades, and who will bring to the conversation a familiarity with both the writer and the work that most interviewers cannot claim.
The occasion
There is something specific about this event that goes beyond the book’s literary distinction. Ghost Stories will be discussed at a bookstore whose owner helped shape the literary community that surrounded its subjects, in a city that gave both Auster and Hustvedt a recurring platform over four decades, one year after Auster’s death. The book contains his last unfinished words. The conversation will be moderated by one of his friends.
For readers who have followed either writer, Thursday night at Books & Books is a way of honoring the dead by continuing to speak about what they made.
AN EVENING WITH SIRI HUSTVEDT In conversation with Mitchell Kaplan Ghost Stories (Simon & Schuster, $30)
When: Thursday, May 7, 7 p.m.
Where: Books & Books Coral Gables, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables
Admission: Free and open to the public
Books: Available for purchase at the event
Book signing follows the discussion
