Trylogia nowojorska Paula Austera

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

Klasyczne dzieło Paula Austera w nowej odsłonie! Szklane miasto, Duchy i Zamknięty pokój – trzy opowieści o samotności, zagubieniu i poszukiwaniu tożsamości, przełożone na język komiksu przez wybitnych artystów: Davida Mazzucchelliego, Lorenzo Mattottiego i Paula Karasika. Mroczna, wciągająca podróż po labiryncie Nowego Jorku, w której czarny kryminał spotyka egzystencjalny dramat.

Komiks dla czytelników, którzy cenią ambitne powieści graficzne. Jedna z najlepszych komiksowych adaptacji literatury w historii.

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

400 pages, Hardcover

Published September 24, 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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

[Jeff · 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.

[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 · 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.

[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!

[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

[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.

[Lorie Kleiner Eckert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a big fan of the late Paul Auster. I have read almost everything he has written. The New York Trilogy is an early work of his and it sets the tone for all that comes after it. I love it even though it tends to break my brain when I read it.

I have read the original New York Trilogy (ONYT) several times. Like the Graphic New York Trilogy (GNYT) – and as both titles imply – three stories make up the whole work: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. All of the stories are mysteries.

My copy of the ONYT has this description of “Ghosts” on the back cover: “Blue, a student of Brown, has been hired by White to spy on Black. From a window of a rented room on Orange Street, Blue keeps watch on his subject, who is across the street, staring out of his window.”

That summary adequately explains how Auster plays with his reader’s brain.

In 1994, City of Glass was adapted into a graphic novel that became a cult classic. It has been published in more than thirty countries. Ever since then, fans have waited for the other two stories to be adapted. The wait is now over.

Three artists have worked on GNYT. Paul Karasik art directed all three books. City of Glass is illustrated by David Mazzucchelli. Ghosts is illustrated by Lorenzo Mattotti, and The Locked Room is adapted and drawn by Karasik. (Karasik and Mazzucchelli adapted City of Glass for the 1994 version and Mazzucchelli created the graphics.)

I do not read a lot of graphic novels so I will not comment on the drawings except to say that the adaptation of Ghosts often contains whole paragraphs under the drawings and there is even a two-page spread of all text. Perhaps that attests to the intricacies and nuances of that particular tale.

Indeed, I think all of Auster would be difficult and tricky to pare down into graphic form. As we are told on page eleven of GNYT, “What [he] liked about mysteries was their economy. There is no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not, it has the potential to be so. Everything becomes essence: the center of the book shifts, is everywhere…and no circumference can be drawn until the end.”

On page nine of the ONYT this statement is much longer and includes this: “Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing must be overlooked.”

As an Auster-lover, I do not want to miss even one word he has to say (with the exception of his 880-page book 4321…), so I prefer the ONYT.

However, this graphic version of the trilogy scrambled my brain in many ways, just as I would expect a Paul Auster book to do. Its quick read is therefore a fabulous introduction to Auster. I hope readers will go on from there to read more of his work.

[Thurston Hunger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took a while to click for this the Pantheon 2025 graphic edition. Came out right around the time Auster died, and after our book club had read his text version of the trilogy.

Actually it was the "City of Glass" graphic novel that led me to this trilogy, just a tremendous way to capture a tricky tale. That said, also idea for instance in tracing the spelling out by walking the streets of New York. Mazzuccheli really showcases the power of comics in my opinion here. Close shots, quick changes, varying the details and the use of onomatopoeia within frames.

"Ghosts" in black white, despite the playful "colorful" names of characters is more like an illustration with for the text. Flipping through now though, interesting to see p100 and from City of Glass and p207 from Ghosts, we see a doppelganger mirrored across the two artists. The same stubble and rolled up shirt sleeves, and this reflects the fun house hall of mirrors for identities in all three stores. I tried to find that image in the closing Locked Room, but did not see it. But again Mazzuccheli exploring and exploding the frames - the world turns upside down. A man is built of words, and crumbles. Drawing of drawing, drawing further away the silhouette split, or the looming shadow across the building. Fanshawe versus a not so still Stillman, Auster is another austere character. Dead letters and undead betters.

That tale of the birthday party gift is just perfectly captured.

So much promise for both Auster's tales, and the power of comics here. Should create an index list of recommended RISD comics, and hope my son eventually adds to 'em.

[Zac · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three stories where an investigator is sucked so far into the mystery that they lose their identity and sense of reality. It’s a bit ambiguous as to whether the stories are linked in any other way than the main ideas and some recurring motifs and names. I loved the first story with art by the very talented David Mazzucchelli (see Asterios Polyp and Batman: Year One) and this started out more like a usual detective story. I thought that this one would be hard to beat, but the whole book was enjoyable. The second story was composed mostly of images with longer tracts of text, so (having not read the original novels) it was a bit more difficult to ascertain the extent to which this was an adaptation or whether it was the original work with accompanying illustrations. This story was a bit more surreal and symbolic, with none of the characters having realistic names. The third story was a bit of a mix of the first two, with a more discernible plot and moving a bit closer to a graphic adaptation. The individual stories were great, and the book as a whole was excellent with many returning ideas but never being repetitive.
Gripping, complex but not dense. I do think the art adds something to this, particularly in the first story, so I don't really feel the need to track down the original texts as I can't imagine that they include much that is missing.

[Firat Fidan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Postmodern edebiyatın en önemli isimlerinden biri olarak kabul edilen Paul Auster’in en çok bilinen eseri ‘The New York Trilogy’ kimlik arayışını, tesadüfleri ve gerçekliği sorgulayan bir eser.

Eserin ilk hikayesi olan “City of Glass”, bir dedektiflik hikayesi gibi başlıyor ama okuyucuyu bir kimlik labirentine sokuyor.
Kim kimin yerini alıyor, dil ne kadar güvenilir, şehirde mi yoksa zihinde mi kayboluyoruz?
Auster, çözüm sunmuyor; çözümsüzlüğün doğamızda olduğunu anlatıyor. Özetle, gerçeği ararken kendimizi kaybettiğimiz bir roman.

İkinci hikaye, “Ghost”ta ise yazar okuyucuya varoluşu sorgulatıyor. Karakterlerin renklerle simgelenmesi aslında birey olmadıklarını bize anlatıyor. Yazar dış dünyasını sorgularken aslında kendi iç dünyasını sorguladığını fark ediyor. Felsefi altyapılı bir edebiyat eseri.

Trilogy’nin son hikayesi olan “The Locked Room” hem karanlık hem de içe dönük bir hikaye. Kaybolan bir yazarın yerine geçmeye çalışan eski dost ve hayran bir kişiliğin, içsel sorgulamalarının bolca paylaşıldığı bu hikayede kayboluşun ve yokluğun içine geçişin zihinsel çıkmazı da anlatılıyor.

Kapalı kapıların sadece dışarıda değil içeride de nasıl olduğunu merak ediyorsanız bu trilogy kitabını mutlaka okuyun.

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two stories are so perfectly adapted, especially city of glass, but i really hated the style of drawing in the locked room, and i feel like it skipped most of some moments i thought were especially important. i already had the graphic novel of just city of glass, which i love a lot and i think is basically perfect, and i really loved the way ghosts was done which also worked really well.

[Elisabeth Winkler · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just finished The Locked Room. I read it in a day. It gripped me from the start and did not let go. I could argue with a few things: the unresolved theme of lying destroying intimacy and the ending. But no, I will not argue. I loved the writer writing about writing (as if he were a failed one), and his concept of identity got me in the solar plexus. It was masterful and haunting. I cannot wait to read the rest of the trilogy.

[Becky Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this a hell of a lot more than I enjoyed the actual novel! Weird.

A great adaptation, taking the description into pictures and leaving the script with just the best writing. It worked really well.

[Damian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life is meaningless. To search for meaning only brings unhappiness.

[TC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended.

Review posted at Tzer Island book blog:

https://www.tzerisland.com/bookblog/2...

[Stephanie B · Rating 4 out of 5]

lovely graphic novel adaptations... capturing the essence well