Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker's novel, The Mezannine, turned a lunch hour into a postmodern version of The Odyssey. In Room Temperature, originally published by Grove Press in 1984, Baker takes the reader even greater distance in the course of twenty minutes, although his narrator is obliged to be stationary, as he is giving his baby daughter her bottle. Though all in the room is still, the narrator's mind is not, and in inspired moments of mental flight, Mike's...

"Ten years into researching a book about the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker was frustrated and disheartened. In the course of his research, he had become deeply disillusioned with the process of FOIA requests. He has been forced to wait years in some cases, while other requests have been answered only with documents rendered inscrutable, or even illegible, by copious redactions. Rather...

In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel first published in 1986 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback the author of Vox and The Fermata uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one's shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. Nicholson Baker's...

Selected Short's most popular volume! Over three hours of stories to tickle your funny bone. Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil" performed by Thomas Gibson A darkly comic thriller about a tractor historian besieged by man-eating potatoes. David Schickler's "Jamaica" performed by Isaiah Sheffer A man with his head stuck between the banisters has no choice but to listen in on his wife's "Gorgon Book Club." Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" performed by Christina Pickles...

"Baker's second nonfiction collection, ranges over the map of life to examine what troubles us, what eases our pain, and what brings us joy. Baker moves from political controversy to the intimacy of his own life, from forgotten heroes of pacifism to airplane wings, telephones, paper mills, David Remnick, Joseph Pulitzer, the "OED," and the manufacture of the Venetian gondola. He writes about kite string and about the moment he met his wife, and he...

"The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America's best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic...