[citation needed] During the late 1950s, he was a contributor to Film Culture magazine before publishing two novels and a monograph on American fiction in the 1960s.
[6][7][8] Later reorganized as FC2, the collective has since published many emerging writers (including Russell Banks and Mark Leyner) and does so currently through the University of Alabama Press.
Although he remained a board member, Baumbach's own involvement as writer with FC2 finished when the collective rejected his novel B in 2002; it was ultimately published elsewhere.
"[citation needed] In the novels which followed, Baumbach has been said to be 'representative of a new style of novelist' alongside contemporaries Ronald Sukenick, Jerzy Kosinski, and William H. Gass[citation needed] while developing an experimental approach bearing comparison with surrealist and magical realist writers in their use of dream imagery.
"[citation needed] His second novel, What Comes Next, further explores the themes in his critical study and 'organizes itself as a literal landscape of nightmare, as all reference points for the character's reality are located within his own disjointed perceptions.
"[citation needed] In his fourth, Babble, Baumbach constructs his narrative from "the stories his infant son allegedly tells him.
"[citation needed] Baumbach's work has been compared with the dreamlike filmic style of David Lynch and is often grouped with postmodernists like William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover.