Bloodbath Nation
Publisher, Faber & Faber
Publication Date,
Format, Hardcover
Weight,
No. of Pages, 160
Among its victims are men, women, teenagers, children, and even babies. The massacres have taken place in churches, schools, movie theatres, and at rock concerts. Auster establishes how America’s love affair with guns goes all the way back to the arrival of the first British settlers – guns in hand – who used these guns to eradicate the Native Americans who occupied the country. This history of carnage continues to this day.
Interwoven into the text are photographs taken by Spencer Ostrander of the locations of the mass killlngs – which serve as mute testaments to the lives that have been lost.
Guns have become one of the issues dividing America today, but Auster doesn’t take sides. The book is a plea for both sides to find a way of avoiding more death and grief. Accompanying Auster’s text is a series of photographs of the locations of these mass killings. There are no bodies – only the empty spaces which stand as mute memorials to the lives that have been lost.
About the Author
Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Among his other honours are the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke and the Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan. He has also been shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions) and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance). His work has been translated into more than forty languages.
He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
- Dimensions : 16.4 x 2 x 25.7 cm
