Paul B. La Farge is an American novelist, essayist and academic. As of 2017, he has published five novels: The Artist of the Missing, Haussmann, or the Distinction, The Facts of Winter, Luminous Airplanes and The Night Ocean, all of which, particularly Haussmann, have earned positive critical attention. His essays and reviews have been published in outlets such as The Village Voice, Harper's, and The New Yorker.
La Farge's first novel, The Artist of the Missing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May 1999, and illustrated with surrealist images by cubist artist Stephen Alcorn. The novel takes place in an anonymous, modern-day city in which people go missing on a regular basis. Frank, the titular character, paints portraits of the missing, among whom are his parents, his brother James and, eventually, even his romantic interest, enigmatic police photographer Prudence, whose job it was to take pictures of corpses. Reviewers compared the debut work to those of Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges and categorized him among "literary wizards" and "fantasists". Two years later, his second novel, Haussmann, or the Distinction purports to peel layers from the mysterious private life of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the flawed genius city planner who, in the 1860s, masterminded the carving up of Parisian streets into modern boulevards, of which the Champs-Élysées is the most renowned example. In his review for The New York Times, Edmund White called it "imaginative — indeed, a hallucinatory — approach, one that ends up by transforming his supremely practical subject into an elegant and sometimes grotesque fairy-tale hero". The novel's insistently presented premise extended to the "reproduction", in the opening pages of the book, of the title page of the "posthumously" published in 1922, "first French edition of Haussmann, or the Distinction", and the inclusion, in the afterword, of daguerreotypes, the first of which depicts a female whom the caption identifies as "Yvonne Dutronc, ca. 1872", a character which does not even appear in the main narrative, but is mentioned only in the afterword, in La Farge's own footnote and on the dedication page—"for Y." The second image purports to be that of "Paul Poissel in 1880" and both are described as having been "found" by the afterword's veritable author, Paul La Farge, himself, in the archives of the French national library, Bibliothèque nationale. An elaborate website, , which expands the conceit, assigns June 4, 1848-November 17, 1921 as Poissel's dates, along with myriad details about his life and times. The entire website functions as satire, including, at one point, the accusation that the American author "masquerading" under the French name "La Farge" had the audacity to put his own name on front cover, as if he was the actual author. Other parts of the website include quotations, such as an excerpt from a 1934 letter Walter Benjamin "wrote" to Gershom Scholem, in which he makes a deeply complicated observation about Poissel, and also MP3 files featuring early archival "recordings" of Poissel's voice, reciting portions from his own "works". Haussmann, as a whole, also serves to display the depth of La Farge's scholarship into the period of the Second Empire as well as his playfulness with language. The "Poissel" name extends to and, to a degree, La Farge's third book, The Facts of Winter which, on its front cover, states, "by Paul Poissel, translated by Paul La Farge". It is also set in Paris, although the year is now 1881, a decade into the Third Republic. The reader is privy to "a series of short dreams, each dreamed by people in and around Paris, which is to say that it is a fictional account of the imaginary lives of people who may or may not be real". Again, La Farge's command of French is featured, as the dream accounts come to the reader in both French and English, and the descriptive language is hauntingly poetic. The scholarly "afterword" strives to elucidate further the work and thought of the "unjustly neglected" author of this tome, Paul Poissel. His book Luminous Airplanes is the humorous story of a young man with two mothers who learns a family secret while cleaning out his grandfather's house in upstate New York. The book was published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and features immersive text. A description of the book appears . It was listed as one of "the " by Emily Temple in Flavorwire. In March 2017, La Farge publishedThe Night Ocean, a novel about a doctor investigating the relationship between horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and a teenage boy. The novel, published by Penguin Press, was listed as one of by Jeva Lange in The Week.
