Nicholson Baker

With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, 'Human Smoke' re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to the Second World War, and in so doing challenges some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen.

From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author of Vox and the most original writer of his generation, his most audacious novel yet.Meet Jay. Meet Ben. Jay has summoned his old friend Ben to a hotel room not far from the nation's capitol. During the course of an afternoon, they will share a delicious lunch and will crack open a bottle of wine from the hotel minibar. They will chat about everything from Ben's new camera to Iraq to the unfortunate fate of a particular free-range chicken. And Jay will explain to Ben exactly why and how he is planning to commit a murder that will change the course of history.From the Hardcover edition.

"Emmett has a wife and two children, a cat, and a duck, and he wants to know what life is about. Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks.". "What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no farther than Emmett's hearth and home. Nicholson Baker's extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved."--BOOK JACKET.

"Since the 1950s, our country's libraries have followed a policy of "destroying to preserve": They have methodically dismantled their collections of original bound newspapers, cut up hundreds of thousands of so-called brittle books, and replaced them with microfilmed copies - copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age. Half a century on, the results on this policy are jarringly apparent: There are no longer any complete editions remaining of most of America's great newspapers. The loss to historians and future generations in inestimable." "In this book, writer Nicholson Baker explains the marketing of the brittle-paper crisis and the real motives behind it. Pleading the case for saving our newspapers and books so that they can continue to be read in their original forms, he tells how and why our greatest research libraries betrayed the public's trust by selling off or pulping irreplaceable collections. The players include the Library of Congress, the CIA, NASA, microfilm lobbyists, newspaper dealers, and a colorful array of librarians and digital futurists, as well as Baker himself, who discovers that the only way to save one important newspaper archive is to cash in his retirement savings and buy it - all twenty tons of it."--BOOK JACKET.

A child's view of the world. She is Eleanor Winslow, a precocious nine-year-old whose American parents move to England. She has opinions on many subjects--friendship, monsters, injustice--which she expresses in a monologue.

The essay entitled "Discards" references library catalog retrospective conversion projects and discusses Harvard University's disposal of its card catalog in particular.

A man and a woman, residents of distant cities, share a telephone conversation with increasing levels of self-disclosure.

The book is a study of how a reader engages with an author's work: partly an appreciation of John Updike, and partly a kind of self-exploration.

Mike's thought on his newfound parenthood lead him back to his own childhood and to reflections on the objects of his youth-- from glass peanut butter jars to French horns.

Although most of the action of The Mezzanine occurs on the escalator of an office building, where its narrator is returning to work after buying shoelaces, this startlingly inventive and witty novel takes us farther than most fiction written today. It lends to milk cartons the associative richness of Marcel Proust's madeleines. It names the eight most significant advances in a human life —beginning with shoe-tying. It asks whether the hot air blowers in bathrooms really are more sanitary than towels. And it casts a dazzling light on our relations with the objects and people we usually take for granted.

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.

Nicholson Baker tells us all about the time in 2014 he worked as a substitute teacher in the Maine public school system.

Paul Chowder is a poet, but he's fallen out of love with writing poems. He hasn't fallen out of love with his ex-girlfriend Roz, though. In fact he misses her desperately. As he struggles to come to terms with Roz's new relationship with a doctor, Paul turns to his acoustic guitar for comfort and inspiration, and fills his days writing protest songs, going to Quaker meetings, struggling through Planet Fitness workouts, wondering if he could become a techno DJ, and experimenting with becoming a cigar smoker.

Can a great story transform a worthless trinket into a significant object? The Significant Objects project set out to answer that question once and for all, by recruiting a highly impressive crew of creative writers to invent stories about an unimpressive menagerie of items rescued from thrift stores and yard sales. That secondhand flotsam definitely becomes more valuable: sold on eBay, objects originally picked up for a buck or so sold for thousands of dollars in total — making the project a sensation in the literary blogosphere along the way. But something else happened, too: The stories created were astonishing, a cavalcade of surprising responses to the challenge of manufacturing significance. Who would have believed that random junk could inspire so much imagination? The founders of the Significant Objects project, that’s who. This book collects 100 of the finest tales from this unprecedented creative experiment; you’ll never look at a thrift-store curiosity the same way again.

Nicholson Baker ranges over the map of life to examine what ails us, what eases our pain, and what gives us joy. Baker - recently hailed as 'one of the most consistently enticing writers of our time' by The New York Times - 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.