Antithesis

Nat Baldwin's mesmerizing Antithesis is not quite a memoir, not quite a treatise on music and art and education, not quite a reading log filled with the best books of the last century, not quite an anti-narrative a la the noveau roman scribes Robbe-Grillet and later David Markson, filled with upended expectations and erasures and lists and interesting factoids. Rather it is all of that and more. This book is a symphony with dazzling, definitive movements, a collage made of water and blood, and above all a search for beauty and belonging and ultimately an illustration of blazing one's own path in a world dominated by the routine and mundane. 

-Robert Lopez, author of The Best People

Antithesis is a captivating meditation on what it means to make and consume art. While reading I felt the boundaries of genre dissolve into a fluid, effervescent slush of beauty taken in, and beauty dolled out. I saw myself in this book not only because I am, literally, a named character within it, but because I saw the obsessiveness of my own writing and reading life in these pages. It's a true portrait of what it feels like to be a hopelessly addicted reader. This is a book about how we make ourselves, and how the art we consume lives inside of us. In Antithesis Baldwin's mind appears as a body encased in permeable mesh where music, basketball and books seep in and out and mix and coalesce. 

-Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot

Nat Baldwin is a writer attuned to the resonant, droning field of the page. Herein, the voice splits. Times overlay and hum together. Events become enharmonic tones. The story we read making possible the story taking place below the story, one we can only sense in the sounding, but is simultaneous and synchronized. Part anti-memoir, part shared history of experimental music and experimental literature, Baldwin's Antithesis resounds. It completely mesmerized me.

-Danielle Vogel, author of A Library of Light