Name: A Box of Matches
ISBN: 9780375706035

Nicholson Baker

During a month in the life of a forty-five-year-old editor of medical textbooks, Emmett--married with children, a cat, and a duck--ruminates about the meaning of life during his pre-dawn sojourns alone. By the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

A Box of Matches

During a month in the life of a forty-five-year-old editor of medical textbooks, Emmett--married with children, a cat, and a duck--ruminates about the meaning of life during his pre-dawn sojourns alone. By the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. 50,000 first printing.

A Novel

Ryan Hagerty

The writing is amazing. Nicholson Baker is adept at making the mundane somehow magical. This book's beauty is all down to the details and in that way, it is spectacular. 

However, there is no central plot and the entire thing feels very experimental. There is no progress and you could read the chapters in any order at all and it'd still make perfect sense. Each chapter isn't different another from the ones around it to make it stand out as an individual story or event, but the entire thing isn't cohesive either, which makes it hard to endure to the end. 

I appreciate the experiment, but I don't know that publishing it in a novel format was the right move. Diary entries as part of a larger, overarching novel might read better.

Jack Baty

Lisa

Morgan Thomas

Emmett wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks. What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett's hearth and home.