Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room

by Paul Karasik (Editor), Paul Auster, David Mazzucchelli (illustrator)

From award-winning novelist Paul Auster comes the graphic adaptation of his deeply beloved series, The New York Trilogy, a postmodern take on detective and noir fiction.

In 1994, Paul Auster's City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel and became an immediate cult classic, published in over 30 editions worldwide, excerpted in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern Fiction. But City of Glass was only the first novel in a series of books, Auster's acclaimed New York Trilogy, and graphic novel readers have been waiting for years for the other two tales to be translated into comics.

Now the wait is over.

The New York Trilogy is post-modern literature disguised as Noir fiction where language is the prime suspect. An interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, each book explores various philosophical themes. In City of Glass, an author of detective fiction investigates a murder and descends into madness. Ghosts features a private eye named Blue, trailing a man named Black, for a client called White. This too ends with the protagonist’s downfall. And in The Locked Room, another author is experiencing writer’s block, and hopes to brake it by solving the disappearance of his childhood friend. The second two parts of this trilogy will be appearing in this volume for the very first time as a graphic novel.

Paul Karasik, the mastermind behind the three adaptations, art directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by the award-winning cartoonist David Mazzucchielli, the second volume, Ghosts, is illustrated by New Yorker cover artist, Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik himself. These adaptations take Auster’s sophisticated wordplay and translate it into both highbrow and lowbrow and immensely fun reading.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Mystery, New York, Classics

400 pages, Hardcover

Published April 8, 2025

About the author

Paul Karasik is an American cartoonist, editor, and teacher, notable for his contributions to such works as City of Glass: The Graphic Novel, The Ride Together: A Memoir of Autism in the Family, and Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All!. He is the coauthor, with Mark Newgarden, of How to Read Nancy, 2018 winner of the Eisner Award for "Best Comics-Related Book". He is also an occasional cartoonist for The New Yorker.

Reviews

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Omg this was phenomenal. It was so metafictional and dark and part of me has no idea what I even just read but I loved every bit of it.

Auster has written a detective novel of sorts - or it feels like it - but it is hugely postmodern. As well as the stories feeding into each other in weird ways, it also seems to leak into the real life of Auster himself. Like there were genuine moments when I had to just put the book down and scream because it was so weird and twisted, but I couldn't stop reading.

I think the structure and themes have been replicated in so much fiction before and after it, and so much of what happens is pretty believable and wouldn't say there are any real plot twists. But I think considering the way in which this text engages with the postmodern era, and the execution of some of the revelations, this book genuinely was crazy. But it was a triumph.

Really wish I'd read this sooner but I think studying American postmodernism has meant I can fully appreciate this text in it's entirety. I'm just a whore for metafiction basically and this book had everything in it and I really love it. Would definitely recommend if you have the same taste in novels as me because this is gonna screw you up and you will be very glad it did.

[Rod Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

Surreal and boring detective stories adapted from the works of novelist Paul Auster.

City of Glass ~ 2 stars ~

A man who may be a writer and may not be a private detective tracks a man recently released from prison who may or may not intend to harm his own adult son. Boring shadowing leads to an even more boring and ridiculous stakeout, all accompanied by a spiraling loss of identity.

The best-illustrated section of the book, it actually reads like a graphic novel. A boring graphic novel, mind you.


Ghosts ~ 1 star ~

A riff on Kafka has a secret agent named Blue spying on a man named Black on behalf of a boss named White. Black seems to spend his days harmlessly writing, but -- who knows? -- he may be spying on Blue in turn. It spirals into loss of identity slop.

This is an illustrated story with gloomy, often symbolic pictures taking up the top half of the page and typeset prose taking up the bottom half. There are a few pages of sequential action, but there are also a few pages of just text, so that's a wash.


The Locked Room ~ 2 stars ~

Fanshawe disappears, walking away from his pregnant wife and leaving a closet stuffed with manuscripts. Fanshawe's best friend steps in, providing comfort to the supposed widow, finding a publisher for Fanshawe's oeuvre, and starting research on a book of Fanshawe's life. The research spirals into a quest to find out what happened to Fanshawe while losing touch with his own identity.

Some names from City of Glass are recycled so as to give the impression this trilogy has somehow come full circle. But no, not really.

At least this section reads like a graphic novel again, though it is a bit too text-heavy.


(Best of 2025 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:

• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2025
• Publishers Weekly 2025 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2025: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

This book made the PW list.)


FOR REFERENCE:

Reprints City of Glass: The Graphic Novel with the first-ever publication of adaptations of Auster's Ghosts and The Locked Room.

Contents: City of Glass / Paul Karsik and David Mazzucchelli, adapters -- Ghosts / Paul Karasik and Lorenzo Mattotti, adapters -- The Locked Room / Paul Karasik, adapter

[Drew Canole · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Mazzucchelli's adaptation of City of Glass (the first in this trilogy) was such a smashing success in 1994 that they quickly brought out comic adaptations of the next 2 novellas waited 30+ years to adapt the second two.

I read Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy pretty recently and Mazzucchelli's adaptation, so I skipped the first book this time around. My rating is just for the new content. Although if you don't have a copy of City of Glass this is well worth picking up for the nice hardcover format.

I was really hoping they somehow coerced Mazzucchelli into continuing the book. Unfortunately that's not the case. However, the adapter of that comic Paul Karasik adapts and draws the third book. Lorenzo Mattotti does the second.

I really like Lorenzo Mattotti's artwork on Ghosts. But it's not really a comic, most of it is half page illustration and text right from the book. At first I was a bit bummed it wasn't a comic, but I actually think this approach works very well for the story. I think it may be slightly abridged, but feels like the entire story is here. This does feel like an improvement over the original text in some ways. I want to check out Mattotti's Eisner winning adaptation of Dr Jekyll.

Karasik's The Locked Room... I really didn't love this. I don't think the adaptation justified its existence, I'd rather just read the original text. It's not bad, I just didn't connect with the art style.

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of three stories that bend genre and mind. Characters descend into madness and confusion and take the readers with them, making it perhaps more understandable how the human brain can get to such a place.

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took some time before I got into this, now I can’t get out.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not at all to my taste. way too much angst and main characters dissociating and finding out, or deciding, that their lives are meaningless. Depressing.

[John R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book had quite the little hype machine around it, and my partner has said she's wanted to read the original books (at this point, neither of us have), so I gave it a shot.

I guess I was anticipating a sort of Eisner-esque, American Splendor type down to earth New Yorker story. But that's not what this is at all. It's noir, it's weird. It's esoteric and delightfully literary, and I loved (almost) all of it.

As a graphic novel, the second "book" Ghosts, was much more an illustrated story that initially rankled me a little, but by the end -- and, man, what an end! -- it had won me over. City of Glass was probably my favorite of the three, but they do overlap and intersect in curious ways.

All of the art is fantastic. Mazzucchelli is the most... comic booky, of the styles. Mattotti is the darkest and most graphic. Karasik, who oversaw the completion of the entire book, has a really good indie-comix style that suited the more down to earth (?) feeling of The Locked Room.

I'm really glad I checked this out. Sometimes the hype is right!

[Sonia · Rating 4 out of 5]

First read these novels in 1994, bought the Mazzucchelli City of Glass at the Strand a year or so later, have always enjoyed rereading it. It took me a while to get through the text heavy Ghosts, but I love Karasik's art and lettering in the last one. All in all a neat idea and well executed.

[Jeff Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, which I admit I have NOT read. It’s a weird book, or rather three books. Mind-bending, genre-bending, and odd.

All three stories are somehow interconnected but it’s not immediately clear. All three stories involve writers, detectives, missing persons, lovesick men, imminent threats, and New York. Some of the same names and themes show up in the stories, including Paul Auster himself.

I’m not sure what to make of it all or how to feel about it. I didn’t hate it, I didn’t love it, and I definitely didn’t understand it. So I’m tagging it as a 3/5.

[Jeroen Schwartz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Las van het origineel (nog) alleen het eerste deel. Dat vond ik fantastisch. Deze verstripping van alle drie de delen is geweldig wat mij betreft. Onnavolgbaar soms (de verhalen an sich), wat volgens mij de bedoeling is. Heel mooi hoe verschillende de tekenaars aan de haal gaan met Auster. Ik was een goeie dag geboeid door zoveel geheimzinnigheid, dubbellevens, ongemakken, leugens - een doolhof van verzinsels, aliassen, frustraties.

[Kyle Pollock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Auster and Paul Karasik’s graphic adaptation of The New York Trilogy proves that some literary experiments translate beautifully to visual form—and others struggle against the page.

City of Glass is near-perfect, one of the finest graphic novels I’ve encountered. Karasik and artist David Mazzucchelli understand that Quinn’s descent into dissolution demands visual fragmentation. As Quinn loses himself in his surveillance of Stillman, the panels themselves break down—grids fracture, perspectives multiply, text and image blur. When Quinn ends up living in an alley, the sparse illustrations mirror his erasure. The notebook motif becomes literal: we see his obsessive diagrams, his mapping of Stillman’s walks forming letters that spell nothing. Manhattan’s geography gains texture through Mazzucchelli’s stark, angular cityscapes—fire escapes, brownstones, the oppressive grid that mirrors Quinn’s mental prison. The adaptation doesn’t just illustrate Auster’s metafictional puzzle; it deepens it by making the reader aware of the comic form itself, panels as cells, pages as surveillance.

Ghosts translates poorly, though the book’s problems are baked into the source material. The recursive loop—Blue watching Black watching Blue—should work visually, but the layout feels claustrophobic in the wrong way. Where City of Glass uses fragmentation purposefully, Ghosts just feels cramped and repetitive, panels bleeding into sameness because that’s all Blue experiences: waiting, watching, endless paralysis. The color-coded names (Blue, Black, White) lose their abstraction when you have to draw distinct faces for each character. What worked as conceptual minimalism in prose becomes visually inert. The adaptation can’t escape what makes the novella the trilogy’s weakest entry: concept overwhelming character, philosophy smothering story.

The Locked Room improves on Ghosts considerably but never reaches City of Glass‘s heights. The emotional grounding helps—Sophie feels real, the narrator’s childhood with Fanshawe has warmth and specificity. The illustrations capture key moments effectively: the narrator and Fanshawe as boys, the awkward affair with Fanshawe’s mother, the drunken chase through Paris where past and present collapse. When the narrator confronts the locked door in Boston and speaks to the unseen Fanshawe, the visual metaphor lands perfectly: two panels separated by darkness, speech bubbles crossing a void that cannot be bridged. The final scene—tearing up Fanshawe’s notebook page by page as the train departs—works beautifully in sequential art, each torn page a separate panel, the act of destruction as catharsis.

But The Locked Room‘s strength in the original—its novelistic depth, the slow accumulation of psychological detail—is harder to capture in the condensed graphic format. The narrator’s obsession feels more rushed, the stakes lower. We lose some of the interiority that made his breakdown so devastating.

The trilogy’s self-referential structure gains new dimension in graphic form. When the narrator chases Peter Stillman through Paris, we recognize Mazzucchelli’s visual style from City of Glass—we’re literally seeing the trilogy fold back on itself, one story bleeding into another. Quinn, Blue, and the narrator aren’t just thematically linked; they share the same visual language, the same stark black-and-white world. Identity is fluid because the comics form makes it literally impossible to distinguish them.

What emerges across all three adaptations is how surveillance and observation function visually. Comics are inherently voyeuristic—we watch characters through rectangular windows, panel by panel. The trilogy’s obsession with watching becomes the reader’s experience: we are detectives too, searching for patterns, reading signs, trying to solve mysteries the narratives deliberately withhold. Karasik and his collaborators understand this perfectly in City of Glass, struggle with it in Ghosts, and find adequate solutions in The Locked Room.

City of Glass remains essential—a masterpiece of adaptation that proves graphic novels can tackle philosophical complexity without sacrificing visual invention. Ghosts is interesting primarily as an artifact of adaptation’s limits, a demonstration that not everything translates. The Locked Room is solid, emotionally effective, but not transcendent.

Together, they’re a fascinating case study in what comics can and cannot do. Auster’s trilogy asks whether stories can make meaning from chaos, whether identity holds under pressure, whether observation leads to understanding or madness. The graphic adaptation adds another layer: can pictures do what words do? Can panels solve what prose cannot?
City of Glass answers yes, brilliantly. The other two remain locked rooms of their own.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

[Doreen · Rating 3 out of 5]

9/22/2025 4 stars for the art but God, Auster is just as pointless now as when I read him back in the day. Full review tk at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.

9/25/2025 When I was in my 20s, I dated a guy who loved Haruki Murakami and Paul Auster. Those weren't the reasons I dumped him, but they should have been signs. And it's not like I didn't try my darnedest either! I did get some enjoyment out of the Murakami I read, but bounced right off of Paul Auster's pretentious ass. And you know what, pretentious isn't the worst thing in the world. Trouble is, Mr Auster's fiction was guilty of a far greater crime, IMO: being clinically boring. With so many books and so little time, I was pretty sure I wasn't missing out by skipping any more of his work after City of Glass.

Smash cut to the present, where I'm contemplating a graphic novel version of the three books in Paul Auster's The New York trilogy. I'd recently read and deeply enjoyed Manu Larcenet's graphic novel adaptation of a book I loathed, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Could the acclaimed trio of illustrators here do the same for my opinion of Mr Auster's works?

Yes and no. Using illustrations to transmit much of the story instead of forcing me to endure the entirety of Mr Auster's prose stylings certainly helped make the experience less tedious for me. And each artist does a terrific job with the material he has, keeping me gripped from first page to last. Their art keeps the narrative moving in a way that the stories, unfortunately, do not.

What's weird is that I love metafiction! I love Borges and Calvino! Sara Gran's Little Mysteries is by far one of my favorite books of 2025. But what all those authors have in common is the ability to tell a compelling story which, frankly, none of the books in The New York trilogy are. In addition to that, they're each cursed with the Eight Deadly Words: I cared about none of these characters.

The artists here do their best. Working in black and white, they each bring a signature style to their assigned stories. While I probably enjoyed the art of David Mazzucchelli's City Of Glass adaptation the most, I felt like Paul Karasik's work on The Locked Room was the most inventive. Which is not at all a slight on Lorenzo Mattotti, whose illustrations of Ghosts are so much more interesting than the text itself. But there's really only so much you can do to retain a reader's interest when the stories themselves are so meh.

As a non-fan of Mr Auster's I thought this volume was readable, accessible and interesting. The art was great, and I'd read anything of Messrs Mazzucchelli, Mattotti and Karasik's again! I thought the art elevated the prose as far as it could, in a beautiful volume that is a visual feast. That luxe quality alone should merit it a place on the shelf of any fans of Mr Auster too.

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy by Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti & David Mazzucchelli was published April 8 2025 by Pantheon and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a strange book. City of Glass, the first part of the trilogy, illustrated by Born Again illustrator David Mazzuchelli, is one of the all-time greatest graphic novel adaptations (it made The Comics Journal's "100 best comics" list at/around the turn of the 21st century). It's perfect as a standalone work, beautiful, sublime. The second book, Ghosts, features some fine Paul Auster prose (it's the starkest and simplest of the three stories, probably the most classically "horrifying") but is undermined by Lorenzo Mattotti's mediocre adaptation (I'm sure he's a fine illustrator, but this "illustrated novel" just doesn't work, and the illustrations sometimes don't even make sense from panel to panel, e.g., the inconsistent rendering of a gun first on p. 219 (some kind of Luger?) and then a standard .45 on p. 221). The Locked Room, illustrated by Paul Karasik himself, is perfectly serviceable, and you can even see how he helped Mazzuchelli lay out the first book. But Karasik's faces are all wrong for this, and so the necessary gravitas regarding the most accessible of the stories (a man disappears; his friend marries his wife, raises his kid, sells his stories (though not as his own) and then tries to hunt him down) just isn't there.

Even so, if this had included a couple pages from Karasik explaining the protracted creative process (I mean, why not? There's more than enough space, the Pantheon design and binding are exquisite, etc.) I might have appended a "favorites" designation to it. But there isn't, so it's fine - recommended, even - but not what it could have been.

[Rana Biswas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy
(City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room)
By Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti, David Mazzuccelli.

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls" - Pablo Picasso.

This is definitely one of the best books (if not the best book) I've read this year. Paul Auster's post modern noir thrillers on similar or interlinked themes, is something that you don't see/read every day. I have never seen such stories where the author himself and his own psychological presence is so highly invested that at times you wonder whether you are reading a story or an autobiography. One of those rare books where the story telling is more disturbing than the story itself. And hats off to Paul Karasik, Lorenzo Mattotti and David Mazzuccelli. I can't even imagine the thought process of how they converted these unique stories into graphic form. Just wow. But this book is not for everyone, so proceed with caution.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

It starts as it always starts: with a call, a shadow, a wrong turn into a city that is never quite the city you thought it was. The New York Trilogy has always been less about plot than about the act of reading itself, less about solving mysteries than about realizing that the mystery is you. To see it adapted into comics is to see that strangeness doubled back, reflected in another medium, transformed and transformed again until the page itself is unstable.

Auster’s words once haunted readers with their refusal to close. Now, Karasik, Mazzucchelli, and Mattotti haunt us through image: grids fractured, shadows swallowed, color bleeding at the edges. The book is no longer prose alone but a house with three rooms, each darker than the last. The first opens with promise. The second dims the light. The third locks the door.

I. City of Glass

Quinn is a man without a case until the wrong case finds him. A writer who once made detectives speak through his pen, he now impersonates one, and the impersonation devours him. He follows Stillman through the city, believing he is pursuing another, when in fact he is only tracing the outlines of himself.

Mazzucchelli’s art is a triumph of geometry. Grids warp, angles cut, and the city itself becomes a language collapsing into fragments. A spiral of bricks, a notebook of empty lines, a shadow of a man inside the shadow of another. It is the most famous of the three adaptations, the one already canonized as a cult masterpiece, and rereading it here you understand why.

Yet there is a sense, too, that City of Glass is only the beginning. A perfect opening note, but still an opening. The music deepens elsewhere.

II. Ghosts

Blue. Black. White. Names that are not names, identities reduced to colors, characters stripped to archetype. Blue watches Black, writing reports for White. The work is simple. The work never ends. Each day repeats the last. Each word he writes brings him closer to silence.

Mattotti renders this story in washes of color that seem always on the edge of fading. The desk, the window, the figure across the street: they dissolve into dream. The detective becomes the watched man; the watched man becomes the detective. Surveillance is no longer a profession but a mirror.

Some readers will call this story too abstract, too slow, too silent. But the silence is the point. Ghosts is less a narrative than a meditation on the futility of looking. It is the act of reading stripped bare: the moment when you realize you are watching someone else write you.

III. The Locked Room

And then comes the third. The one I cannot shake. A childhood friend, Fanshawe, disappears. He leaves behind manuscripts, a wife, a child, a life unfinished. The narrator inherits it all, first by accident, then by design, until he is no longer sure if he is himself or if he is the man who has vanished.

Karasik’s own artwork here is the starkest of the three. Panels are tight, clean, claustrophobic. Rooms are stripped to essentials. There are fewer distractions, fewer escapes. The austerity itself becomes the story.

This is the locked room: not Fanshawe’s prison but the narrator’s mind. Not the city but the self. If City of Glass dazzles with fragmentation, and Ghosts hypnotizes with atmosphere, then The Locked Room devastates with inevitability. The mystery is no longer language, no longer surveillance, but identity itself. To read it is to discover that the absence of another person can occupy your life more fully than their presence ever did.

For me, this is the story that elevates the trilogy from brilliance to necessity. It is the quietest, but it cuts the deepest. The door closes, and you realize you are on the inside.

IV. Taken Together

The adaptations are not equal, but their inequality is part of their design. The first entices with noir logic, the second strips logic away, the third seals the reader inside the text. City of Glass is dazzling, Ghosts is haunting, The Locked Room is inexorable.

What unites them is not plot but collapse: the collapse of detective fiction into philosophy, the collapse of words into silence, the collapse of the self into its double. Auster wrote novels that unmade themselves as you read them; Karasik, Mazzucchelli, and Mattotti create comics that unmake themselves as you look.

The adaptation is a feat not only of translation but of transformation. It does not illustrate Auster’s trilogy so much as perform it again, in another register. Prose becomes panel, sentence becomes grid, silence becomes white space. What was once the labyrinth of words is now the labyrinth of images.

V. Conclusion

There are readers who will resist it. They will want the detective story that solves. They will want the narrative that ties itself shut. They will want characters with clear names, clear motives, clear fates. They will not find them here. What they will find is something rarer: a meditation on what it means to be a character at all, a story at all, a reader at all.

To me, this graphic adaptation is more than an homage. It is a completion. Auster’s trilogy was always about doubling, about stories that fold in on themselves, about the impossibility of endings. Now, decades later, the novels find their doubles in comics. And like any good double, the reflection both resembles and transforms the original.

For this reason, I give it 90 out of 100.

And now, having written this, I feel the room close around me. The page is no longer a review but a wall. The words stop, though the story does not. Perhaps Fanshawe is writing this. Perhaps Quinn. Perhaps Black. Perhaps it is only me, in a room, imagining that a book can look back.

That is how it ends. Which is only another way of saying: that is how it begins.

[Rick Umali · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent graphic novel! It takes a novel with some fairly abstract concepts (identity, language, consciousness, fragmentation) and brilliantly adapts it to a graphic novel format. The panels are not always square. The images pop out of the frames. The standard conventions for lettering are subverted to accomodate Paul Auster's ideas. It's just marvelous.

I wonder if this graphic novel, and others, could be distributed as a stack of papers, instead of bound as a book. The spine and the number of pages cause the middle part of the pages (and their pictures) to be pinched. This does not detract from the images, but it made me think that there could be another way to view the pictures more fully. (If this book is available digitally, that would address this minor bit!)

[Sharon]

DNF - page 54 (14%)
(January 1, 2026 - first DNF of the year)

I received this book for free via Goodread's giveaway. This has in no way impacted my final rating.

I am sure I did myself a disservice by trying to read this without having read the original novels, but I just don't know if I get postmodern literature. But when the main character said, "If you don't like it, why do you go on reading?" I really felt that. So I took his advice and dipped.

[Victoria Wee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally thought the book was a detective novel and I’m still quite confused where to pocket it. A whole lot of “what is the meaning of everything if everything means nothing” and the last piece of the trilogy makes an attempt to tie everything together but I’m not sure if I’m convinced! Definitely feel that Baumgartner is a far better introduction to austers works

[Zuuru · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really remarkable collection. I won't claim I got it all in this one read of it and certainly it demands a fair bit of context, but the combination of interesting illustrations and a study of crime noir as stories of obsession was fascinating. One of those graphic novel adaptations that manages to precisely capture the mood of the original writing.

[Vic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il romanzo resta uno dei capolavori della letteratura postmoderna americana, ma anche la sua versione graphic novel è abbastanza clamorosa. "La stanza chiusa" vale il riacquisto e la rilettura di questa edizione aggiornata.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightfully weirder and eerier than I was expecting. These are strange and entangled stories about detectives who are shifting and losing their identities and the mysteries are definitely not solved and the cases definitely remain unclosed.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. The authors and artists did an amazing job of transforming these from prose into graphic stories. Rather than simplifying the stories or standing in for words, the illustrations elevated them. Well done!

[Cea M · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won't pretend that I fully understand the stories in this trilogy, but they are engaging and mind-bending. The three narratives intertwine in unexpected points, and the visual art blends reality and imagination through cinematic playfulness on the page. I'd gladly recommend this to other readers.

[LUCIA MORO · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tiene algo que engancha. Pero me da la sensación de que no lo entendía, ni mientras lo leía, ni cuando lo terminé.

[Tere · Rating 5 out of 5]

The New York Review of Books called this "one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature.” True, true, true.

[Chrismulrooney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing. Disturbing. Mesmerising. If you love dark, meta and have a visual sensibility, you will love this.

[Sophie Flint · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dare I say this is better than the non-graphic novel edition

[Yana · Rating 4 out of 5]

A weird metafiction trilogy that took me way too long to get through

[Jangoreadz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely Weird. Thats all I can say…

[LV · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars for David Mazzucchelli’s ink alone. His gorgeous, noir-ish elegant lines catch the paranoia, the shadows, the urban loneliness of Auster’s text in a way words alone never could. If he’d haunted the whole trilogy, we’d have a masterpiece. But he didn’t. Oh well. We will always have Asterios Polyp.