Avoid the Day: A New Nonfiction in Two Movements

Set in Burlington, Vermont, rural Central and Eastern Europe, and beneath a 24-hour sun at the North Pole, this innovative work of nonfiction storytelling is an unforgettable study of experience, mortality, and the artistic impulse to both capture the truth and to provide an individual framework for the artist’s sublime understanding about the meaning of life.In 1904, Béla Bartók heard the most incongruous song from a nanny, originally from Transylvania. Obsessed with capturing this new noise, he trudged through Central and Eastern Europe trailing a first generation recording device (cases of extremely heavy Edison wax cylinders) so that he could carry the voices home and transpose them into his Third String Quartet. In present day, Jay Kirk is a successful journalist who is desperately searching for something to distract him from his father’s deathbed. And what better diversion than tracing Bartók’s path to locate the missing—and some say stolen—original composition? But when he suffers a psychological breakdown, he’s forced to return home to the idyllic Vermont town where Maria von Trapp was the local celebrity, and where Hitchcock based Spellbound. But Jay’s visit is far from idyllic as his minister father, who is still alive but already wasted away, insists on taking Jay to every funeral in town—a town that also houses the Vermont State Asylum for the insane and whose patients freely walk the streets in zombie fashion. Knowing he’ll lose his mind again if he spends another second here, Jay sets out once more—in search of something ethereal and active this time—on a cruise ship in the Arctic Circle, where he cannot escape the light of day. From the depth and darkness of Transylvania to the blinding surfaces of the Arctic’s never-ending sunshine, Jay Kirk takes readers on a vivid, mesmerizing, and hilarious journey while he warps our sense of reality alongside his own.