Nicholson Baker

A man and a woman, strangers to each other, residents of distant cities, have both called an adult party line. Finding each other's voice attractive, they soon switch to a private, one-to-one connection. Their seduction-through-conversation begins hesitantly and then becomes erotic.

Vox PB

While writing an introduction to a new poetry anthology, Paul Chowder struggles with the end of a relationship, his own stunted career, and the suffering of poets as varied as Tennyson and Roethke.

A Novel

The Anthologist

The author of the quirky masterpiece The Mezzanine turns a young father's feeding-time reverie into a dazzling catalog of the minutiae of domestic love. "A delightful book, homey and comfortable as a slipper. . . . Every page provokes the shock, or at least the smile, of recognition".--Washington Post.

Room Temperature

During a month in the life of a forty-five-year-old editor of medical textbooks, Emmett--married with children, a cat, and a duck--ruminates about the meaning of life during his pre-dawn sojourns alone. By the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

A Box of Matches

Arno Strine, a modest temporary typist, has perfected the knack of stopping time in its tracks and taking women's clothes off, he is hard at work on his autobiography, THE FERMATA, which proves in the telling to be a provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work.

The Fermata

A National Book Critics Circle Award-winner elevates the ordinary events that occur to a man on his lunch hour into “a constant delight” of a novel (The Boston Globe). In this startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive novel, New York Times–bestselling author Nicholson Baker 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. Baker’s accounts of the ordinary become extraordinary through his sharp storytelling and his unconventional, conversational style. At first glance, The Mezzanine appears to be a book about nothing. In reality, it is a brilliant celebration of things, simultaneously demonstrating the value of reflection and the importance of everyday human experiences. “A very funny book . . . Its 135 pages probably contain more insight into life as we live it today than anything currently on the best-seller list.” —The New York Times “Captures the spirit of American corporate life and invests it with a passion and sympathy that is entirely unexpected.” —The Seattle Times “Among the year’s best.” —The Boston Globe “Baker writes with appealing charm . . . [He] clowns and shows off . . . rambles and pounces hard; he says acute things, extravagant things, terribly funny things.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “Wonderfully readable, in fact gripping, with surprising bursts of recognition, humor and wonder.” —The Washington Post Book World

The Mezzanine

Describes how the author became an on-call substitute teacher in pursuit of the realities of American public education, describing his complex difficulties with helping educate today's students in spite of flawed curriculums and interpersonal challenges.

Going to School with a Thousand Kids

Substitute

A collection of essays covers topics ranging from the destruction of library card catalogs and model airplanes to clip art, metaphors, and the art of reading aloud.

Essays and Other Lumber

The Size of Thoughts

Describes how libraries across the United States have dismantled collections of original bound newspapers and brittle books to replace them with microfilmed copies, exploring the hidden reasons for such policies.

Libraries and the Assault on Paper

Double Fold

A major new work, a hybrid of history, journalism, and memoir, about the modern Freedom of Information Act - FOIA - and the horrifying, decades-old government misdeeds that it is unable to demystify, from one of America's most celebrated writers Eight years ago, while investigating the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker requested a series of Air Force documents from the early 1950s under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Years went by, and he got no response. Rather than wait forever, Baker set out to keep a personal journal of what it feels like to try to write about major historical events in a world of pervasive redactions, witheld records, and glacially slow governmental responses. The result is one of the most original and daring works of nonfiction in recent memory, a singular and mesmerizing narrative that tunnels into the history of some of the darkest and most shameful plans and projects of the CIA, the Air Force, and the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. In his lucid and unassuming style, Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early fifties that aimed to achieve an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date. Along the way, he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease, leaflet bombs filled with feathers, suicidal scientists, leaky centrifuges, paranoid political-warfare tacticians, insane experiments on animals and humans, weaponized ticks, ferocious propaganda battles with China, and cover and deception plans meant to trick the Kremlin into ramping up its germ-warfare program. At the same time, Baker tells the stories of the heroic journalists and lawyers who have devoted their energies to wresting documentary evidence from government repositories, and he shares anecdotes from his daily life in Maine feeding his dogs and watching the morning light gather on the horizon. The result is an astonishing and utterly disarming story about waiting, bureaucracy, the horrors of war, and, above all, the cruel secrets that the United States government seems determined to keep forever from its citizens.

My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act

Baseless

A study of the decades leading up to World War II profiles the world leaders, politicians, business people, and others whose personal politics and ideologies provided an inevitable barrier to the peace process and whose actions led to the outbreak of war.

The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization

Human Smoke

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.

a book of raunch

House of holes

Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

A True Story

U and I

A second collection of essays by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Double Fold explores what ails humanity, what eases pain and what brings joy in an anthology that considers subjects ranging from political controversies and the human fascination with video games to the forgotten heroes of pacifism and the intimacy of the author's own life. 25,000 first printing.

Essays

The Way the World Works

An accomplished poet tries his hand at songwriting, Quaker meetings and tobacco experiments while he copes, badly, with his ex-girlfriend's new relationship with a local NPR radio host in this new novel from the best-selling author of The Anthologist.

Traveling Sprinkler

From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author ofVoxand the most original writer of his generation, his most controversial novel yet.

Checkpoint

U & I

In the New York Times bestseller House of Holes, Nicholson Baker, “one of the most beautiful, original, and ingenious prose stylists to have come along in decades” (The New York Times Magazine), returns to the terrain that made him famous with a gleefully provocative, off-the-charts erotic novel that is unlike anything you’ve read—“a filthy tour de force” (Time). Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. So begins Nicholson Baker’s fuse-blowing sexual escapade—a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in a pleasure resort where normal rules don’t apply. House of Holes, one of the most talked-about books in recent memory, is a gleefully provocative novel sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.

Nicholson Baker

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