The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published
sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986),
it has since been collected into a single volume. Ostensibly presented as
detective fiction, the stories of The New York Trilogy have been described as
"meta-detective-fiction", "anti-detective fiction", "mysteries about mysteries",
a "strangely humorous working of the detective novel", "very soft-boiled",
a "metamystery" and a "mixture between the detective story and the nouveau roman"
This may classify Auster as a postmodern writer whose works are influenced by the
"classical literary movement" of American postmodernism through the 1960s and 70s.
There is, however, "a certain coherence in the narrative discourse, a neo-realistic
approach and a show of responsibility for social and moral aspects going beyond
mere metafictional and subversive elements"[citation needed], which distinguish
him from a "traditional" postmodern writer. The New York Trilogy is a particular
form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the
detective novel (the classical and hardboiled varieties, for example) but also
creates a new form that links "the traditional features of the genre with the
experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism."

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