Takhini Books, Victoria, Canada
Takhini Books
Literary publishing
Fiction and memoirs by Anton Baer
Books
A satire of ambition and fraud in an underground world of Edwardian nursery tales trampled over by trash.
Dirty rotten scoundrels Herbie Peel and Dickie Dirt have only until sunrise to make it big.
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Essay, travelogue, novella. Guelph in the Afternoon, Nostalgia, Achtung Baby EndStation!, Return, Doppelgänger, Last Plane Out, Epilogue, Red Star Rising.
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Whitehorse in the 1960s. A father who suffered a blow to the head from an axe, a favourite uncle who showed kids how to walk across a ceiling.
Or: Home, and how to leave it.
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Coming next...
An ugly Australian ex-soldier in Israel falls in love by mistake.
A young Australian in London, office Lothario, walks out one evening into Bristol Street.
Thirty years later he returns from poverty in Perth to find a woman who has forgotten him.
The Swiss family Schultz arrive in Mexico to start up an air cargo business... A few years later Johnny, black sheep of the family, steals his father's girlfriend, and the desert comes up to whack him.
The Yukon trilogy, WAITING FOR HITLER ON THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK NEWS, coming soon.
A German ex-soldier lives quietly in Whitehorse until a visiting Jew from his home town, now in Poland, vanishes. A few weeks later, a young local fails to come home from a fishing trip. Suspicion for what looks like murder falls on Theo Wolfe.
Harald Wolfe, embittered son of Theo, ends up in Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, looking for traces of his father's past.
Elke Wolfe and Yury Solski, the younger brother of the local man who never came home from his fishing trip, face their last summer at home.
Why here?
I left Canada for Mexico at 16. Till then I had read only science fiction. Returning to the Yukon, one snowy morning in English class I opened a textbook of short stories to Hemingway's Cross-country Snow set in Switzerland. The last sentence ran out at the top of a mostly blank page of fresh snow that the two skiing friends had just vanished down. I never read science fiction again.
During university I worked one spring in Yugoslavia. Before leaving for Bosanski Šamac on the Sava River I studied Serbo-Croat and read Rebecca West (Black Lamb, Grey Falcon). At a gas station outside Belgrade, of all places, I stumbled across Heinrich Böll's And Where Were You, Adam? on a rotating book rack – another absolutely electrifying discovery.
After graduating I returned to Europe, and over the years Canada and the Yukon fell behind.
In Munich and then the former Czechoslovakia I discovered Kurt Tucholsky, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Konstantine Paustovsky, Isaac Babel and Joseph Roth.
In London a literary agent told me that my Yukon novel, WAITING FOR HITLER ON THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK NEWS, had 'immense potential', but that I ought to split it into two books. The novel is now three volumes, the first of which, the last to be written, should be finished by 2027.
This very same manuscript I had sent from Slovakia to agencies in Toronto. One agent who picked up the phone four months later said: "Well, if I had received it I would have thrown it in the trash because I do not read unsolicited." She then hung up on me.
A much more pleasant person, Hilary McMahon of Westwood Creative Artists, told me that the agency handled only writers with a Toronto-area dial code.
Hence this imprint.
Cover designs are my own.
Cover photograph of Elm Street by Susan Lind Gleason.
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