A Box of Matches (Magill’s Literary Annual 2004)
At a glance:
- Author: Nicholson Baker
- First Published: 2003
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: January to February of some year later than 1996 (probably 2002)
- Setting: A house in Oldfield, Maine
- Principal Characters: Emmett, Claire, Phoebe, Henry
- Genres: Long fiction, Novel
- Subjects: Family or family life, United States or Americans, Authors or writers, Twenty-first century, Poetry or poets, Middle age, Computers, Maine
- Locales: Maine
A Box of Matches is a cunningly clever book, elegant in its simplicity and inspired in its depiction of the perfectly ordinary. The book is nothing more than thirty-three journal entries by the narrator/protagonist, a forty-four-year-old editor of medical textbooks named Emmett. He touch-types the entries on a laptop computer, keeping the display in dark colors for both text and background so that it casts little light. Instead of looking at the screen, he watches the fire that he lights with a single match each morning, enjoying the darkness outside and the solitude of early...
[The entire page is 1907 words long]
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