Nicholson Baker

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...

This wide-ranging, fresh perspective on the political and social landscape that gave rise to World War II delivers a moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and 1940s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources--including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries--the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy....

In 2014, after a brief orientation course and a few fingerprinting sessions, Nicholson Baker became an on-call substitute teacher in a Maine public school district. Nearly every morning, he awoke to the dispatcher's five-forty a.m. phone call and headed to a nearby school. When he got there, he did his best to follow lesson plans and help his students get something done. In Baker's hands, the inner life of the classroom is examined anew -- mundane...

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...

Presents an explicit new tale of carnal improprieties and comic raunchiness set in a surreal but familiar world of fantasy sex A fuse-blowing, sex-positive escapade. Baker returns to erotic territory with a gleefully over-the-top novel set in a pleasure resort where normal rules don't apply. In charge of day-to-day operations is Lila, a former hospital administrator whose breast milk has unusual regenerative properties

"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...