In this astonishingly acrobatic work, Paul Auster traces the compulsion to make literature -- or art -- through essays on Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan, Laura Riding, Knut Hamsun, John Ashbery, and other vital figures of our century.In a section of interviews as well as in the revelatory "The Red Notebook", Auster reflects on his own work: on the need to break down the boundary between living and writing; on the use of certain genre conventions to penetrate matters of memory and identity. The Art of Hunger undermines and expands our accepted notions about literature and throws an uprecedented light on his own richly allusive writing.