Low Fidelity Press

"Jonathan Baumbach has been a hero of mine since I started writing. I was then, and remain today, avid for novelists who push the limits of the novel's form without sacrificing its traditional human juices. Baumbach is just such a writer, and B is just such a novel—smart, edgy, full of feeling, not quite like anything I've ever read." —Michael Cunningham, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, on B

B
a novel

by Jonathan Baumbach

Trade Paperback
Price: $13.00
200 pages / 6X9
ISBN 0-9723363-0-3
Pub. Date: Dec. 1, 2002

No one before him may have so tacitly failed at writing a memoir as Jonathan Baumbach's poet-protagonist, B, an intellectual's Bukowski, who struggles to write his history in this comedic new novel. But the events herein exist largely in the gray area between the facts of B's life and the fantasies and fictions of his mind, calling into question the validity, even the importance, of truth in memory. Nothing, it seems, has ever really gone B's way. In one flawed incident, he arrives at a small liberal arts college to deliver a reading and is mistaken for a famous attorney notorious for defending the indefensible. He plays it off, calmly taking the stage and proclaiming to thunderous applause: "I am not the man you think I am." B is not the man anyone thinks he is, including himself. His failed attempts at reconstructing his life lead him to the realization that any story is simply what's become of its character's life. But how can B have failed so miserably at writing his own memoir, unless the life that memoir attempted to recount was also a failure?

Born in Brooklyn, son of a painter, father of four including a filmmaker, Jonathan Baumbach is the author of numerous books, including Reruns, Babble, Chez Charlotte & Emily, The Life and Times of Major Fiction, Seven Wives and D-Tours. Though mainly a a novelist, he has published over 80 short stories in such places as Esquire, American Review, Fiction International, Partisan Review and TriQuarterly. He has been widely anthologized and has appeared in O.Henry Prize Stories and Best American Short Stories. In 1973, he cofounded Fiction Collective, the first large scale writing cooperative in America. He has written on movies for Partisan Review and is a former chairman of the National Society of Film Critics. Over the years, he has taught at Brooklyn College, Brown, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Tufts, University of Washington, and Ohio State. He currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. and Great Barrington, Mass.

Bernard Malamud on A MAN TO CONJURE WITH: "Jonathan Baumbach writes a rare sad comedy of the uses and misuses of love. I've rarely seen the walking broken-hearted, good-willed but inept, who 'go wrong' in most human relations, treated with such sensitive understanding and inventiveness. ...This is a fine first novel."

Robert Coover on CHEZ CHARLOTTE AND EMILY: "In all of Jonathan Baumbach's fiction, there is a wonderful balance of ease and authority, subtlety and surprise, wisdom and playfulness, and in Chez Charlotte and Emily, this balance is almost magical. He's one of my favorite writers."

Russell Banks on THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MAJOR FICTION: "This wonderful book of stories, if only because of its title, invites comparison and then stands the test: this is major fiction. Which is not to say that the book is not hilarious--it is, and in a major way. Many of us who love contemporary fiction know that Jonathan Baumbach has been doing work of the first order for years; The Life and Times of Major Fiction, if there's any justice in the literary world, should bring him the wider recognition he deserves."

Kirkus Services on RERUNS "Baumbach's control of that slippery underground logic of the mind-as-world turned against impotent self with all the scarifying chaotic details painted in blood is hilarious and hilariouser until it hurts."