NEWS: Bridge Books Announces New Experimental Memoir Title: Nat Baldwin’s “Antithesis”
Nat Baldwin. Photo: Matt Mehlan.
NEWS
Bridge Books Announces New Experimental Memoir Title: Nat Baldwin’s Antithesis
ANTITHESIS WILL BE RELEASED SPRING/SUMMER 2025 WITH EVENTS TO BE ANNOUNCED
Bridge Books, publisher of the Bridge Journal, a division of Bridge Art Nfp, the registered Illinois 501 (c) 3 not for profit organization that also publishes the weekly online Bridge magazine at bridge-chicago.org, today announces publication of a new experimental memoir title, “Antithesis” by Nat Baldwin. Acquired for the press by Bridge Journal Fiction Section Editor Meghan Lamb, the memoir will be released by Bridge Books in Spring/Summer 2025.
In Antithesis, musician and writer Nat Baldwin presents a polyphonic self-portrait of a creative life across disciplines, blurring the boundaries between language and sound. The collage-like narrative unfolds in a loose chronology of statements of fact about music, books, people, circumstances and myriad other topics of personal significance. Each chapter spirals around distinct affinities, guided by shared questions and concerns. As threads of intertextual activity emerge and overlap, the prose vibrates and hums, allowing a sonic world to link to the unconscious. The careful curation of references and assorted details accumulates into an indirect representation of self akin to an exoskeleton in text. While ghosts of an unspeakable grief also haunt the work, the act of its making reveals a new time being conjured, offering a living archive of the composition process itself and a map to a possible future.
“I never thought writing ‘the story that most spends me’ would be such a joy, but I already miss the process of following the unpredictable paths of these pages.” says Baldwin. “Lucky for them, this collection of memories, actions, and events is no longer subject to my obsessive attention and is now moving on to live new lives through encounters with others, interacting with a network of experiences and conditions through which I am connected but also entirely separate, making meaning far beyond my control. I’m so grateful to anyone taking the time to bring such a life into existence, and to Bridge Books for creating that opportunity.”
“Nat’s work holds a special place for me,” explains Bridge Books publisher Michael Workman. “Reading it, I immediately recalled the work of experimental novelists such as David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress and others of the Postmodern novel era. Similarly, it’s crammed with literary and musicological references that I and others of my generation will immediately recognize as the history of an independent writing and publishing scene at a moment of a whole generation’s coming-into-consciousness of it. Antithesis does all that, and simultaneously serves as a sort of mixtape that elevates Baldwin’s interest in the intersections of music, memoir and literary fiction into a new, enthralling and vibrantly original work of deep artistic reflection.”
About Nat Baldwin
Nat Baldwin is a composer and double bassist from Maine currently living in Western Mass. He’s released several solo and collaborative works across genres and runs the experimental music label Tripticks Tapes. His previous collection of short fiction, The Red Barn, was published in 2017 by Calamari Archive. Antithesis is his first publication of hybrid non-fiction.
View the full press release here.
