4 3 2 1 (2017) marks a new direction in Paul Auster’s work. This coming-of-age novel relates the formative years of Archie Ferguson through four parallel destinies. Delighting in story-telling, it embodies Auster’s notion of the “spectrum of a human being”: four characters, identical in name, body and heredity, four versions of the same weaving an anatomy of ontological plurality. The first page tells the tale of migrant arrival at Ellis Island to where the protagonist’s grandfather, Reznikoff, has travelled after leaving Minsk on foot. His name, which no doubt pays homage to one of Auster’s most influential precursors, deemed insufficiently American, he is advised to call himself Rockefeller, but forgets and is mistakenly transformed into Ichabod Ferguson (from the Yiddish “I have forgotten”). Consequently, the tycoon is dismissed in favor of the literary fathers and the rewriting of founding myths. Between pastiche and homage, memory and oblivion (the “archive” surfaces in Archie), at the crossroads between the picaresque and the metafictional playfulness of Auster’s early novels, not to mention the darker concerns of his post-9/11 work, where history is obliquely yet systematically inscribed, 4 3 2 1 (released on the eve of Paul Auster’s seventieth birthday) takes on the misleading appearance of a testamentary piece. After writing short poems, essays, novels, autobiographical pieces and movie scripts, Auster now expands the body of his narrative prose with a titan novel that turns on parallelism and counterfactual realities––thus adding a new mode of representation to the literary scene. Although this exponential narrative unfolds in part along thirty to forty-line run-on sentences, it is paradoxically composed of very short fragments––blank pages, embedded short stories and poems, historical narratives immune to the distortion of fiction. It explores the typically Austerian themes of enclosure, doubles and the process of writing. In this new book, the characters from Auster’s previous novels who attended Columbia in the 60s resurface. Paul Auster’s New York and Paris are mapped out again and again. His early enquiries recur, be they poetic or philosophical, into notions of solitude, loss, love, ambiguity, chance and failure; he probes the boundary between the world and the word, the necessary distancing between the writer and his pen, or else the interiority of literary experience. And so, given that several key elements in Paul Auster’s work are present in 4 3 2 1, it offers the opportunity to look back on his overall achievements. After a seven-year gap in fiction, Paul Auster has now returned with a tour de force—a family saga, a Bildungsroman quadrupled, an odyssey radically different from his previous work (Ferguson 3 in fact reads Homer’s Odyssey). Meanwhile, Auster has also published two autobiographical books (2012-13) and two outstanding books of conversations, respectively with J. M. Coetzee (2013) and I. B. Siegumfeldt (2017), which focus on the autobiographical and fictional breakthroughs of his multi-faceted oeuvre. The critical and popular success of 4 3 2 1 calls for a renewed effort to develop Auster studies. Various international projects undertaken since Beyond the Red Notebook (1995) demonstrate that academic interest in his work remains as strong as ever: among the monographs are Aliki Varvogli’s The World that is the Book (2001) and Mark Brown’s Paul Auster (2007). While S. Ciocia and J. A. Gonzáles edited The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster (2011), and Arkadiusz Misztal published Time, Narrative and Imagination: Essays on Paul Auster (2015), I. B. Siegumfeldt has been seeking to establish the Center for Paul Auster Studies in collaboration with Paul Auster. In order to strengthen these advances, we are inviting specialists to contribute to this issue on Paul Auster’s old and new avenues. Abstracts in English or French may address the following aspects, among others: The American canon The French and European heritage Fiction, poetry, essays, autobiographical writings and filmography Jewish-American writing Paul Auster and postmodernism Bildung, filiation, initiation and the picaresque Embedded narratives, scripts, pictures, artworks, poems, short stories, articles and archives Story-telling, tales and myths Trauma, disaster, violence, testimony The process of writing and enclosure Political engagement Poetry and prose studies: rhythm, musicality, breath, syntax Hybridity, formal mutations, translation, trans-media representation Humor and comedy 300-word abstracts should be sent to François Hugonnier (francois.hugonnier@univ-angers.fr) and I. B. Siegumfeldt (siegum@hum.ku.dk) together with a brief bio-bibliographical note before 15 September 2018. Notification will be sent to the participants by 15 October 2018. Completed articles to be submitted by 1st March 2019. You are invited to read and follow the norms for presentation indicated on the peer-reviewed Revue LISA / LISA e-journal website (), ISSN: 1762-6153, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Revues.org.