A deliciously satirical postmodern romance Seven Wives reimagines the search for an enduring passionate love. The too-much-loved narrator, Jack, an extension of the everyman hero of Baumbach's novel Reruns marries seven women, including a childhood sweetheart, an older woman who turns out to be an unacceptably near relation, the loveliest woman in the world, a woman so fat that sex with her becomes impossibly difficult, and a woman who confuses violence and love. Jack's quest for the perfect marriage is, of course, doomed to failure and ultimately leads him to the edge of madness, but it also produces seven bizarrely interesting near-misses along the way. From his home in New York City, Jack tells his story after the fact, as a way of reclaiming himself. He obsesses not only about his search for the right woman but also about his quixotic pursuit of a version (or versions) of the American dream. Jack moves from cabdriver, to actor, to scriptwriter for pornographic movies, to entrepreneur, to Hollywood producer. Seven Wives treats marriage and career as inseparable pursuits on the same road to success. The two abiding issues of all of Baumbach's fiction - the erratic workings of the imagination and the even more erratic workings of the human heart--appear in their purest form in his latest novel.

Deals with the confrontation between an aggrieved 18 year old boy and his estranged novelist-turned-screenwriter father Morris Dickstein wrote (in Harper's) of Jonathan Baumbach's previous novel that it "beautifully explores the relationship between what we image and who we are." My Father More or Less, which deals with the confrontation between an aggrieved eighteen-year-old boy and his estranged novelist-turned-screenwriter father, is a continuing exploration of the fiction making capacities of the imagination.

A staple in the literary scene for over forty years, Jonathan Baumbach's latest novel, Dreams of Molly , is a wonderful addition to his oeuvre. A love story as only Baumbach can write, it is filled with the longings and lingerings, the sex and deprivation, the humor and heartache, and the New York nuances that have driven Baumbach's fiction from the start. Jonathan Baumbach is the author of fourteen books of fiction, including You, or The Invention of Memory ; On The Way To My Father's Funeral: New and Selected Stories ; B, A Novel ; D-Tours ; Separate Hours ; Chez Charlotte and Emily ; The Life and Times of Major Fiction ; Reruns ; Babble ; and A Man to Conjure With . He has also published over ninety stories published in such places as Esquire , Open City , and Boulevard . Baumbach, co-founder of The Fiction Collective in 1973, the first fiction writers cooperative in America (it was reinvented as FC2 in 1988), has seen his work widely praised. His short stories have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , The PEN / O.Henry Prize , and The Best of Tri Quarterly . The New York Times Book Review referred to him in 2004 as an underappreciated writer. He employs a masterfully dispassionate, fiercely intelligent narrative voice whose seeming objectivity is always a faltering front for secret passion and despair.

A meditation on the mysteries of love, it is also a house of mirrors in which a single relationship is fractured into infinite possibilities and the corridors lead deep into a labyrinth of memory and desire. "You" offers a new way to look at ourselves, startling with uncanny reflections.

Babble, a babybook for our time, is a fiction about (1) loss of innocence, (2) rites of passage, (3) family life, (4) babies, (5) baby-sitters, (6) war and peace, (7) robots, (8) raw youth, (9) crime and punishment, (10) stories, (11) sex and death, (12) language, (13) advanced education, (14) love, (15) the invention of culture, (16) mystery, (17) play, (18) fathers and sons, (19) superheroes, (20) the dehumanization of art. Babble is a baby book for grown ups, a comic novel about entering and losing the world, an adult dream of lost babyhood. Like Baumbach's previous novel, Reruns , though moving perhaps one step further out (or in), Babble depicts our world through a screen of metaphors, using the stuff of dreams, memory and cultural fantasy.