About the Book
From the critically acclaimed author of The Apartment comes a powerful, poetic, and haunting exploration of loss, love, and isolation. An American living in London receives a phone call from a German policewoman telling him the nearly inconceivable news that his sister, Miriam, has been found dead in her Berlin apartment-from starvation. Three weeks later the man, his father, and an American consular official named Trish find themselves in the bizarre surroundings of a fogbound Munich Airport, where Miriam's coffin is set to be loaded onto a commercial jet and returned to America. Greg Baxter's bold, mesmeric novel tells the story of these three people over the course of three weeks, as they wait for Miriam's body to be released, grieve over her incomprehensible death, and try to possess a share of her suffering--and her yearning and grace. With prose that is tense, precise, and at times highly lyrical, Munich Airport is a novel for our time, a work of richness, gravity, and even dark humor. Following his acclaimed American debut, Munich Airport marks the establishment of Greg Baxter as an important new voice in literature, one who has already drawn comparisons to masters such as Kafka, Camus, and Murakami.
About the Author :
Greg Baxter was born and raised in Texas. Over the last twenty years, he has lived variously in Ireland, England, Austria, Chicago, Louisiana, and Germany. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Apartmentwhich Twelve published in 2012 and the memoir A Preparation for Death. He now lives in Berlin, where he writes and translates. Kevin Stillwell is an actor, voice talent, and Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. His film and television credits include Looper and Drop Dead Diva.
Review :
It is precisely this sort of subversion, along with the author's shimmering prose, that makes THE APARTMENT such a surprisingly compelling read and so apropos; it captures the mood of the current moment and what seems to be a new "lost generation," one formed not so much by exposure to violence, as immunity to and alienation from it. Once upon a time, there was no place like home; in Mr. Baxter's world, home, it seems, is no place.-- "Adam Langer, The New York Times"
'I was born to hate the place I came from.' Greg Baxter's first novel THE APARTMENT is a short but powerful exploration of that sentiment, uttered halfway through the novel by its narrator, a 41-year-old American ex-Navy officer and Iraq War veteran.-- "Chicago Tribune"
A beautiful meditation on brutality and culture, which are sometimes one and the same.-- "Minneapolis Star Tribune"
A true gem... Lucid, often hypnotic and, at times, even transporting. [Baxter] keeps his sentences short, his adjectives limited, his pacing leisurely. The paragraphs are long and there are no chapter breaks, yet his acute observation means this is no mere minimalist undertaking... The Iraq sections are astonishingly well done, and the man's history as a Naval officer feels almost exactly right to the former Naval officer who happens to be writing this review.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books"
Absorbing, atmospheric and enigmatic... With its disorienting juxtaposition of the absolutely ordinary and the strange and vaguely threatening, the novel evokes the work of Franz Kafka and Haruki Murakami, while its oblique explorations of memory suggest a debt to W.G. Sebald... Baxter's provocative, unsettling novel is, among other things, about the inexorability of identity and 'the immortality of violence.'-- "Los Angeles Times"
An elegant portrait of a man half-fractured, half-intact-a post-war somebody caught between repair and capitulation, controlling his own fate and imprisoned by regret.-- "The Texas Observer"
In a year marked by epics, it's a relief to delve into this quiet, surprisingly tense debut novel - small enough to fit into a stocking but packing a huge emotional punch.-- "Entertainment Weekly"
In just over 200 pages, The Apartment impressively and tactfully covers everything from the effects of American interventionism on its relationship with Europe to questions of personal identity.-- "Esquire"
In the layered narratives of Baxter's piercing first novel, a young American returned from Iraq struggles to find a new life in Europe.-- "New York Times, Sunday Book Review, Editor's Choice"
In this bleak but affecting novel, an unnamed American expat spends a day walking through a frigid, unidentified European city in search of an apartment...The details of his day are rendered with anaesthetized precision and achieve a cumulative force of grief, equanimity, and resolve.-- "The New Yorker"
ACCLAIM FOR THE APARTMENT "Baxter has written a novel of subtle beauty and quiet grace; I found myself hanging on every simple word, as tense about the consequences of a man finding an apartment as if I were reading about a man defusing a bomb... It is one of the best novels I have read in a long time.-- "Stacey D'Erasmo, New York Times Sunday Book Review"
"Munich Airport confirms [Baxter] as a writer of courage and lucidity. His fluent and assured prose owes some debt to the Austro-Hungarian Franz Kafka and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard...Baxter is high literature."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"Munich Airport is a brilliant achievement."
-- "Wall Street Journal"
"A masterwork of minimalism."
-- "Entertainment Weekly"
"Assured and fluent...a forensic examination of what it means today to be a man, and to be human."
-- "Times Literary Supplement (London)"
"It's a testament to Baxter's skills that so plotless a novel manages to retain such pace and poise...There's something mesmerizing about the prose."
-- "Observer (London)"
"Narrator Kevin Stillwell captures the melancholy tone of the story in a deep baritone. This is a tale of loss and secrets, as well as the confusion of loved ones left behind after the untimely passing of a family member. Stillwell's narration evokes a feeling of deep empathy with the protagonist."
-- "AudioFile"
"Powerful and poignant...The novel's tone, together with Baxter's limpid prose and his narrator's clear-eyed confessions, keep us riveted until the bittersweet climax, when the fog finally lifts and each broken character can take to the sky."
-- "Minneapolis Star Tribune"
"Quiet but mesmeric...It is a novel that, without a trace of sentimentality, is about the importance of family, and conversely how the existential loneliness of each of the characters has impoverished their lives."
-- "Independent (London)"
"So much more bracing and consequential than the bulk of contemporary fiction."
-- "Irish Times"
"Stunning... Few novels so urgently and demandingly make themselves feel as necessary as Munich Airport."
-- "Tweed's magazine"
"This rich and profound book is full of philosophical ideas and stark, ascetic beauty...I wholeheartedly recommend Munich Airport to everyone interested in the ongoing and fascinating human conversation that is first-rate fiction."
-- "Guardian (London)"
The developing themes range from family and life's meanings to the role of memory and the passage of time, all illuminated by some of the best writing appearing in fiction today."
-- "San Antonio Express-News"
