Takhini Books, Victoria, Canada
Takhini Books
Fiction and memoirs by Anton Baer
Out now
Satire in a world of Edwardian nursery tale characters trampled over by post-modernist trash.
Click to order from IngramSpark.
Also available on Amazon
Guelph in the Afternoon. Essay, travelogue, novella. As youth, ambition, love fall behind.
Click to order from Amazon.
Coming in June 2026
How to leave home.
Coming in June 2026.
Coming next:
Three Yukon novels: WAITING FOR HITLER ON THE ELEVEN O'CLOCK NEWS
Theo Wolfe, German ex-soldier, lives quietly in Whitehorse until a visiting Jew from his home town, now in Poland, vanishes off the street. Weeks later, a young local fails to come home from a fishing trip.
Harald Wolfe, embittered son of Theo, leaves West Berlin for Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, to look 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.
Coming next year.
An ugly Australian ex-soldier in Israel falls in love by mistake.
A young Australian painter in London 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 run an air cargo business in northern Mexico. Johnny, black sheep of the family, steals his father's girlfriend, and the desert comes up to whack him.
Why here?
Returning to the Yukon after a year of high school in Mexico, on a dark December morning in English class I opened a textbook to Hemingway's Cross-Country Snow. The story was about two American friends skiing in Switzerland. It was a weirdly gripping story of understated friendship, and it ended at the top of a page as suddenly blank and white as the snow the two men had just vanished down – some sixty years before. They were gone. Until then, all I had read was Asimov, Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. After Cross-Country Snow I never read science fiction again. It was that ski hill in Europe I wanted to find.
Before leaving for Bosanski Šamac on the Sava River for a student work placement at university I studied Serbo-Croat from records and read Rebecca West (Black Lamb, Grey Falcon). Outside Belgrade, at a gas station of all places, from a rotating book rack I pulled off Heinrich Böll's And Where Were You, Adam? – another electrifying discovery.
Over the next years in Europe I discovered Kurt Tucholsky, Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, and Konstantine Paustovsky – writing that took me ever further from English-language writing.
Europe – that darkest, bleakest, most fascinatingly complex maelstrom of a continent has been wrecked, ruined and resurrected after every conflict known to man. Yet that constant creative destruction, debasement and rebirth once created such intellectual brilliance that even a titan like the Swiss mathematician Johann Euler had to struggle to find a post at Basel University. My first book, TRASHLAND, has a great deal to do with the aftershocks of the various European cataclysms.
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, which should begin to appear in 2027.
This very same Yukon manuscript I had sent from Slovakia to literary agencies in Toronto. Four months later, the first agent who picked up the phone 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. I believe she wore flowing purple robes.
The much more pleasant Hilary McMahon told me that her agency, Westwood Creative, 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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