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    Bloodbath Nation
    Bloodbath Nation
    Bloodbath Nation
    Ebook133 pages1 hour

    Bloodbath Nation

    By Paul Auster

    3/5

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    • Gun Culture in America

    • Mass Shootings

    • Photography

    • Gun Violence in America

    • Coming of Age

    • Aftermath of Tragedy

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Hero's Journey

    • Family Drama

    • Haunted Past

    • Noble Savage

    • Dystopian Society

    • Search for Truth

    • Post-Apocalyptic World

    About this ebook

    An intimate and astonishing rumination on gun violence in America from one of our greatest living writers and “genuine American original” (The Boston Globe) Paul Auster

    Paul Auster was a crack marksman as a kid, and like most American boys of his generation he grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B-Westerns. But he also knows how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence: His grandmother shot and killed his grandfather when his father was just six years old.

    Now, at this time of intense national discord, no issue divides Americans more deeply than the debate about guns. There are currently more guns than people in the United States, and every day more than one hundred Americans are killed by guns and another two hundred are wounded. These numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different—and why are we the most violent country in the Western world?

    In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, through the colonial prehistory of the Republic, armed conflict against the native population, the forced enslavement of millions, and the mass shootings that dominate the current news cycle. He examines the embattled gun-control and anti-gun-control camps, frames gun violence as a public health issue, and investigates the details of one horrific incident– including the perpetrator’s unchecked purchase of the gun he used and the suffering of a bystander-turned-hero. 

    Filled with haunting photographs by Spencer Ostrander that document the abandoned sites of more than thirty mass shootings, Bloodbath Nation is an unflinching work about guns in America that asks: What kind of society do we want to live in?

    Editor's Note

    Essential history…

    Gun violence is a singularly American issue, costing over 40,000 citizens their lives each year. In this compelling work of nonfiction, Auster (“Sunset Park”) explores how U.S. gun culture developed — and why the nation has yet to make changes. Blending statistics, anecdotes, and analysis, he walks readers through essential history, including ratifying the Second Amendment, clashes with Native Americans, and modern-day mass shootings, even weaving in his own dark family history with guns.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGrove Press
    Release dateJan 10, 2023
    ISBN9780802160461
    Bloodbath Nation
    Author

    Paul Auster

    Paul Auster (1947-2024) fue escritor, traductor y cineasta. Entre sus obras destacan La invención de la soledad (1982); La trilogía de Nueva York (1987); El Palacio de la Luna (1989); Leviatán (1992); Tombuctú (1999); El libro de las ilusiones (2002); La noche del oráculo (2003); Brooklyn Follies (2005); Sunset Park (2010); Diario de invierno (2012); 4 3 2 1 (2017); La llama inmortal de Stephen Crane (2021); Un país bañado en sangre (2023), en colaboración con el fotógrafo Spencer Ostrander, y Baumgartner (2024). Escribió los guiones de las películas Smoke (1995) y Blue in the Face (1995), en cuya dirección colaboró con Wayne Wang, y los de Lulu on the Bridge (1998) y La vida interior de Martin Frost (2007). Su obra poética está reunida en el tomo Poesía completa (2012) y su obra ensayística y autobiográfica en Ensayos completos (2013). Fue también autor de Una vida en palabras (2018), un volumen que recoge sus conversaciones con la profesora I. B. Siegumfeldt sobre su obra y el oficio de escribir. Recibió numerosos galardones, entre los que destacan el Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, el Premio Médicis por la novela Leviatán, el Independent Spirit Award por el guion de Smoke y el Premio al mejor libro del año del Gremio de Libreros de Madrid por El libro de las ilusiones. Fue nombrado miembro de la American Academy of Arts and Letters y Comandante de la Orden de las Artes y las Letras francesa, así como Doctor Honoris Causa por la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Su obra está traducida a más de cuarenta idiomas y será publicada próximamente en edición definitiva por The Library of America.

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      Book preview

      Bloodbath Nation - Paul Auster

      Also by Paul Auster

      The Invention of Solitude

      The New York Trilogy

      In the Country of Last Things

      Moon Palace

      The Music of Chance

      Leviathan

      Mr. Vertigo

      Smoke & Blue in the Face

      Hand to Mouth

      Lulu on the Bridge

      Timbuktu

      The Book of Illusions

      The Red Notebook

      Oracle Night

      The Brooklyn Follies

      Travels in the Scriptorium

      The Inner Life of Martin Frost

      Man in the Dark

      Invisible

      Sunset Park

      Winter Journal

      Here and Now (with J. M. Coetzee)

      Report from the Interior

      A Life in Words (with I. B. Siegumfeldt)

      4 3 2 1

      Talking to Strangers

      White Spaces

      Groundwork

      Burning Boy

      BLOODBATH

      NATION

      PAUL AUSTER

      Photographs by

      SPENCER OSTRANDER

      Grove Press

      New York

      Text copyright © 2023 by Paul Auster

      Photographs copyright © 2023 by Spencer Ostrander

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

      Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

      Published simultaneously in Canada

      Printed in the United States of America

      First Grove Atlantic hardcover editon: January 2023

      First Grove Atlantic paperback editon: February 2025

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

      ISBN 978-0-8021-6358-5

      eISBN 978-0-8021-6046-1

      Grove Press

      an imprint of Grove Atlantic

      154 West 14th Street

      New York, NY 10011

      Distributed by Publishers Group West

      groveatlantic.com

      AUTHOR’S NOTE

      The images that accompany the words of this book are photographs of silence. Over the course of two years, Spencer Ostrander made several long-distance trips around the country to take pictures of the sites of more than thirty mass shootings that have occurred in recent years. The pictures are notable for the absence of human figures in them and the fact that no gun or even the suggestion of a gun is anywhere in sight. They are portraits of buildings, often bleak, ugly buildings in undistinctive, neutral American landscapes, forgotten structures where horrendous massacres were carried out by men with rifles and guns, briefly capturing the country’s attention and then fading into oblivion until Ostrander showed up with his camera and transformed them into gravestones of our collective grief.

      1

      I have never owned a gun. Not a real gun, in any case, but for two or three years after emerging from diapers, I walked around with a six-shooter dangling from my hip. I was a Texan, even though I lived in the suburbs outside Newark, New Jersey, for back in the early fifties the Wild West was everywhere, and numberless legions of small American boys were proud owners of a cowboy hat and a cheap toy pistol tucked into an imitation leather holster. Occasionally, a roll of percussion caps would be inserted in front of the pistol’s hammer to imitate the sound of a real bullet going off whenever we aimed, fired, and eliminated one more bad guy from the world. Most of the time, however, it was sufficient merely to pull the trigger and shout, Bang, bang, you’re dead!

      The source of these fantasies was television, a new phenomenon that began reaching large numbers of people precisely at the time of my birth (1947), and because my father happened to own an appliance store that peddled several brands of TVs, I have the distinction of being one of the first people anywhere in the world to have lived with a television set from the day I was born. Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger were the two shows I remember best, but the afternoon programming during my ­preschool years also featured a daily onslaught of B Westerns from the thirties and early forties, in particular those starring handsome, athletic Buster Crabbe and his old geezer sidekick, Al St. John. Everything about those films and shows was pure claptrap, but at three and four and five I was too young to understand that, and a world sharply divided between men in white hats and men in black hats was perfectly suited to the thwarted capacities of my young, primitive mind. My heroes were good-hearted dumbbells, slow to anger, reluctant to talk, and shy around women, but they knew right from wrong, and they could outpunch and outshoot the crooked ones whenever a ranch or a herd of cattle or the safety of the town were threatened.

      Everyone carried a gun in those stories, both heroes and villains alike, but only the hero’s gun was an instrument of righteousness and justice, and because I did not imagine myself to be a villain but a hero, the toy six-shooter strapped to my waist was a sign of my own goodness and virtue, tangible proof of my idealistic, make-believe manhood. Without the gun, I wouldn’t have been a hero but a no one, a mere kid.

      I longed to own a horse during those years, but not once did it occur to me to wish for a real weapon or even to fire one. When the chance finally came to do that, I was nine or ten and had long outgrown my infantile dreamworld of television cowboys. I was an athlete now, with a particular devotion to baseball, but also a reader of books and a sometime author of wretchedly bad poems, a boy plodding along the zigzag path toward becoming a bigger boy. That summer, my parents sent me to a sleepaway camp in New Hampshire, where in addition to baseball there was swimming, canoeing, tennis, archery, horseback riding, and a couple of sessions a week at the shooting range, where I first experienced the pleasures of learning how to handle a .22-caliber rifle and pumping bullets into a paper target affixed to a wall some twenty-five or fifty yards away (I forget the exact distance, but it seemed just right to me at the time—neither too close nor too far). The counselor who instructed us knew his business well, and I have vivid memories of being taught how to position my hands when holding the rifle, how to line up the target along the sight at the end of the barrel, how to breathe properly when preparing to shoot, and how to pull back the trigger in a slow, smooth motion to send the bullet surging through the barrel into the air. My eyesight was sharp back then, and I caught on quickly, first from a prone position, where I once scored a forty-­seven out of a possible fifty from the five shots that made up a round, and then from a sitting position, which entailed a whole new inventory of techniques, but just as I was about to advance to the kneeling position, the summer ended, and so ended my career as a marksman. My parents decided that the camp was too far away and sent me to another one less than half the distance from home the following summer, where riflery was not on the menu of activities. A small disappointment, perhaps,

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