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Everyone thought he was dead. The comedy genius Hector Mann was a dazzling rising star in Hollywood in the 1920s, but he suddenly ran away from home one day and was never heard from again. For sixty years, his mysterious disappearance has remained a mystery. Literature professor David Zimmer lost his wife and children in a plane crash, and fell into a quagmire of sadness and depression, unable to extricate himself until he accidentally discovered a fragment of an old Hector movie. Across a huge abyss of forgetfulness, the fate of the two people is closely linked. In order to watch all the existing Hector films, Zimmer traveled around the world to search archives in Europe and the United States. He was deeply impressed by Hector's elegant and witty works and enjoyed them. However, just after Zimmer's monograph on Hector's films was published, he received a letter from the town of Sueno, New Mexico, stating that Hector was still alive and looking forward to meeting him. While Zimmer was hesitating, a mysterious woman suddenly appeared in his secluded cabin, and eventually forced him to embark on a phantom journey full of fog and danger... "A novel that is constantly unexpected", "Phantom Book" tells the story of death within death, stories within stories, about loss, silence and self-salvation: "You have to die first before you can know how to live."

Retired insurance broker Nathan Glass was terminally ill and alone. He just wanted to find a quiet place to "end this miserable and absurd life." Someone suggested Brooklyn, which was his childhood hometown. Nathan meets his long-lost nephew Tom Wood, and together with the equally lost Tom, he gets acquainted with all kinds of little people in Park Slope: a flamboyant and mysterious second-hand bookstore owner, a Jamaican drag queen, a charming restaurant waitress... Nathan gradually falls in love with the generous vitality of Brooklyn, and the sudden intrusion of Tom's niece, the quirky nine-year-old girl Lucy, completely changes the lives of the two men. In the intertwining of fate, Nathan was also able to repair his soul, face the past, and start over. The moon always rises over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the shadows of Hawthorne, Poe and Thoreau still shelter the frustrated and dreamers everywhere. Auster elegantly and affectionately depicts this town as the ultimate refuge of the human spirit.

Mr. Blanc was sitting next to the single bed, unaware that there was a camera on the ceiling facing him and a microphone secretly placed on one wall. Everything in the room had a white note with its name written in capital letters; there was a window on the wall that was sealed with two construction nails; there was a white porcelain handle on the door, but it was unknown whether it was locked; on the mahogany table, there were more than thirty black-and-white photos neatly placed, as well as more than twenty pages of incomplete prison statements. Anna, Sophie, Daniel Quinn, James P. Flood... The characters in the photo take turns to inform Mr. Blanc of the multiple charges he faces. Under the crisis, he began to involuntarily tell the unfinished story on the manuscript... "If you want to tell a good story, it is impossible to have any mercy." But what Mr. Blanc doesn't know is that the dilemma he faces today stems precisely from making up stories in the past. The cruelty of the time; the people who imprisoned him here were the characters he had treated roughly; and these characters, as the creations of another consciousness, will have a longer vitality than the consciousness that created them, because once they are thrown into this world, they will exist forever.