Jonathan Baumbach Books In Order

Novels

  1. What Comes Next (1968)
  2. A Man to Conjure With (1970)
  3. Reruns (1974)
  4. Babble (1976)
  5. Chez Charlotte and Emily (1979)
  6. My Father, More Or Less (1982)
  7. Separate Hours (1990)
  8. Seven Wives (1994)
  9. D-Tours (1998)
  10. B (2002)
  11. You (2007)
  12. Dreams of Molly (2011)
  13. The Pavilion of Former Wives (2016)
  14. Forgotten (2017)

Collections

  1. The Return of Service (1979)
  2. The Life and Times of Major Fiction (1987)
  3. On the Way to My Father’s Funeral (2005)
  4. Flight of Brothers (2013)

Anthologies edited

  1. Statements 2 (1977)

Non fiction

  1. The Landscape of Nightmare (1965)
  2. Shots in the Dark (2017)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Jonathan Baumbach Books Overview

Babble

Babble, a babybook for our time, is a fiction about 1 loss of innocence, 2 rites of passage, 3 family life, 4 babies, 5 baby sitters, 6 war and peace, 7 robots, 8 raw youth, 9 crime and punishment, 10 stories, 11 sex and death, 12 language, 13 advanced education, 14 love, 15 the invention of culture, 16 mystery, 17 play, 18 fathers and sons, 19 superheroes, 20 the dehumanization of art. Babble is a baby book for grown ups, a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost babyhood. Like Baumbach’s previous novel, Reruns, though moving perhaps one step further out or in, Babble depicts our world through a screen of metaphors, using the stuff of dreams, memory and cultural fantasy.

Chez Charlotte and Emily

Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn’t drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves behind his former humdrum life his formidable wife and teenage daughter and embarks on a series of violent and erotic adventures, as dream like as reels of film. Imagine at the same time that a man named Joshua Quartz is telling his silent wife, Genevieve, the story of Francis’s adventures, that they have little other communication, that the story is a way of keeping contact between husband and wife alive. Imagine that at some point Genevieve tells her own story, within and without Joshua’s account. Baumbach’s characters make occasional connections, make love and war, in the disguises of metaphor. If the main action is dream like or fantastic, the real world is always at the window looking in.

My Father, More Or Less

Morris Dickstein wrote in Harper’s of Jonathan Baumbach’s previous novel that it ‘beautifully explores the relationship between what we image and who we are.’ My Father More or Less, which deals with the confrontation between an aggrieved 18 year old boy and his estranged novelist turned screenwriter father, is a continuing exploration of the fiction making capacities of the imagination.

Separate Hours

A disturbingly honest, elegantly imagined unveiling of the way truth becomes elusive in a long term relationship, Separate Hours is a love story about the betrayal of love. Yuri and Adrienne Tipton, both psychotherapists, conduct their separate practices in a shared baseme*nt office in an upper Westside New York brownstone. They also share a ten year old daughter, a too comfortable life, an apparently happy marriage, and a connectedness that blurs the edges of their separate identities. Who is telling the real truth? Can either of the novel’s narrators be taken at their word? Adrienne and Yuri tell the story of their life together and apart, trying to make sense of the darkly irrational. When Adrienne claims that in a movie of their lives, she would be the more sympathetic character, the novel, to test her premise, gives us a possible scenario for the movie. In the further quixotic pursuit of clarity, the novel turns Yuri and Adrienne’s marriage into a case study prepared for a psychoanalytic journal. Separate Hours zeroes in on their marriage and the few things outside that come close enough to get caught in its tentacles. For all the novel’s comic elements, it underlying vision is dark. From the moment of Yuri and Adrienne’s initial meeting, they embrace the conflict. Although they appear to understand what drives them, their behavior for the most part is blindly compulsive and deathbent. Self knowledge has little impact of how they live their lives. Baumbach’s seventh novel examines a postmodern marriage in crisis, as if it were a ‘patient etherized upon a table.’

Seven Wives

A postmodern romance from the author of Separate Hours and The Life and Times of Major Fiction.

D-Tours

A science fiction/fantasy novel in which the narrator hero, Max, has lost his memory. Many of the real or imaginary adventures Max takes part in are based on the plots of films and the author is also a film critic.

B

Fiction. No one before him may have so tacitly failed at writing a memoir as Jonathan Baumbach’spoet protagonist, B, an intellectual’s Bukowski, who struggles to write his history in thiscomedic new novel. But the events herein exist largely in the gray area between the factsof B’s life and the fantasies and fictions of his mind, calling into question the validity,even the importance, of truth in memory.

You

With each new novel, post modern legend Jonathan Baumbach subtly reimagines the shape of the wheel. In his latest, YOU, subtitled, Or the Invention of Memory, the narrator remembers or imagines or invents the story of a not easily defined relationship with a complex and variable woman known in the novel only as You. The style will captivate, needing no explanation as to why Baumbach’s novels continue to connect with a wide variety of readers. You are warily approaching the first sentence of my new novel, not wanting to be taken unaware, or not wanting to be plunged into something from which there is no perceptible exit or perhaps both at once, separate and inseparable concerns. The opening sentence, with your unspoken consent, has edged its way into the barely remembered past.

The Life and Times of Major Fiction

The fourteen stories that make up Jonathan Baumbach’s eighth book of fiction deals with parents, children, love, basketball, billiards, reading, marriage, divorce the essentials of everyday life which, through the author’s unique strategy of narrative, come to the reader in unexpected ways. Combining comedy and nightmare, these stories distinguish themselves by the charge of their imaginative life, their concern with language, and the play and replay of their form.’Familiar Games’ describes a one on one basketball game between a 12 year old boy and his mother, a match that evokes a childhood memory of sexual mystery; ‘Passion?’ concerns the disrepair of a marriage that has presented itself to friends and the world as ideal; ‘Children of Divorced Parents’ centers on the problematic career of a filmmaker who, after several failed marriages, continues to pursue the illusion of first love; and the title story, ‘The Life and Times of Major Fiction,’ investigates the mysterious career of a literary confidence man, an impassioned lover of good books, whose life is itself a pastiche of the plots of major fictions.

Statements 2

Short fiction, including contributions from Robert Coover, Steve katz, Clarence Major, and Ursule Molinaro.

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