Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel, Invisible, is a story about a man trying to tell a story. We see him as a twenty-year-old, and then as a sixty-year-old, struggling to get the story of his twenty-year-old self out. But a life cannot be bound to words, and will have to remain an enigma, invisible forever and ever. Auster explores this impossibility, this essential truth about ourselves and story telling, with all of the artistry of his sixty-three years.

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution, by Dennis Dutton, Oxford University Press 2009. A review by David Maclagan.

BOOK after translated book, a soft-spoken poet who spent a long life writing in an awkward, minority language is taking his rightful place among the giants of world literature — even in his homeland.

If you believe Lin Yutang, author of The Importance of Living, man is a curious wayward dreamer who is furiously pursuing all the wrong things. Yutang has a very specific philosophy for living life which will bring genuine contentment, and he begins with the idea of detachment, which is similar to Buddhist philosophy.

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