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Simon & Schuster
March 2015
On Sale: March 10, 2015
304 pages
ISBN: 145168200X
EAN: 9781451682007
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
A funny, frisky, often outrageous book about love,
literature, and modern life—and a wink of the eye to U and
I, Nicholson Baker’s classic book about John Updike—by an
award-winning author called “wonderfully bright” by The New
York Times Book Review. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker published U
and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also
groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John
Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging,
entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of
this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of
conception, that moment when you realize that there is
writer out there in the world that you must read—so you read
them. B & Me is that story, the story of J. C. Hallman
discovering and reading Nicholson Baker, and discovering
himself in the process. Our relationship to books in the digital age, the role of
art in an increasingly commodified world, the power great
writing has to change us, these are at the core of Hallman’s
investigation of Baker—questions he’s grappled with, values
he’s come to doubt. But in reading Baker’s work, Hallman
discovers the key to overcoming the malaise that had been
plaguing him, through the books themselves and what he finds
and contemplates in his attempts to understand them and
their enigmatic author: sex, book jackets, an old bed and
breakfast, love, Monica Lewinsky, Paris, marriage, more sex,
the logistics of libraries. In the spirit of Geoff Dyer’s
Out of Sheer Rage and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed, B and Me
is literary self-archaeology: a funny, irreverent,
brilliant, incisive story of one reader’s desperate quest to
restore passion to literature, and all the things he learns
along the way.
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