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Understanding Nicholson Baker
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Book Synopsis Understanding Nicholson Baker by : Arthur Michael Saltzman
Download or read book Understanding Nicholson Baker written by Arthur Michael Saltzman and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauded by Vanity Fair as "the best writer of our generation," Nicholson Baker has earned a complex and controversial reputation among contemporary American authors. In addition to being celebrated as a prose miniaturist for such works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Baker is known for highly erotic works such as Vox and The Fermata. In Understanding Nicholson Baker, Arthur Saltzman engages these provocative fictions as well as Baker's nonfiction to show how his seemingly disparate works derive from and demonstrate an unremitting zeal for explicit detail, along with descriptive obsessiveness and linguistic virtuosity.
Download or read book The Mezzanine written by Nicholson Baker and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Double Fold written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2002-08-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ostensible purpose of a library is to preserve the printed word. But for fifty years our country’s libraries–including the Library of Congress–have been doing just the opposite, destroying hundreds of thousands of historic newspapers and replacing them with microfilm copies that are difficult to read, lack all the color and quality of the original paper and illustrations, and deteriorate with age. With meticulous detective work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing in his own retirement account to save one important archive–all twenty tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system.
Download or read book Baseless written by Nicholson Baker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Staggeringly good.” —Counterpunch 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.
Download or read book The Fermata written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having turned phone sex into the subject of an astonishing national bestseller in Vox, Baker now outdoes himself with an outrageously arousing, acrobatically stylish "X-rated sci-fi fantasy that leaves Vox seeming more like mere fiber-optic foreplay" (Seattle Times). "Sparkling."--San Francisco Chronicle.
Book Synopsis Room Temperature by : Nicholson Baker
Download or read book Room Temperature written by Nicholson Baker and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a New York Times–bestselling and National Book Critics Award–winning author comes a “small masterpiece” of fatherhood, childhood, and bottle-feeding (Publishers Weekly). In a novel Entertainment Weekly called “intensely funny and moving,” Nicholson Baker takes the reader on an intellectual odyssey over the course of the twenty minutes it takes a new father to give his baby daughter her bottle. Through inspired moments of mental flight, Mike’s thoughts 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, from typography to courtship, Baker reveals “some of the tenderest, most delicate interaction between husband and wife, adult and infant, in modern fiction” (Los Angeles Times). “Sparkling . . . frequently hilarious . . . This is a big novel unfolding . . . so subtly that one is scarcely aware of its magnitude until the last page.” —The Boston Globe “A delightful book . . . Every page provokes the shock, or at least the smile, of recognition.” —The Washington Post “A major cosmic drama . . . It is a delightful book . . . a real charmer, a breath of fresh air, a show-stopping coloratura aria made of the quirks of memory and the quiddities of daily life.” —The Sacramento Union “[A] small masterpiece by an extraordinarily gifted . . . writer.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Human Smoke written by Nicholson Baker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Book Synopsis The Size of Thoughts by : Nicholson Baker
Download or read book The Size of Thoughts written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays that have appeared in the New Yorker and other publications, includes one never-before-published piece on the world of electronics. The essays celebrate the joy--and exquisite details--of everything from library card catalogs and reading aloud to the significance of wine stains on a tablecloth. Baker turns any subject, from feeding a child to phone sex, into literature with a style that is sparklingly original, frequently beautiful, and always thought-provoking. The Size of Thoughts, through its varied forays into the realms of the overlooked, the underfunded, and the wrongfully scrapped, is a funny book by one of the most distinctive stylists and thinkers of out time.
Book Synopsis A Box of Matches by : Nicholson Baker
Download or read book A Box of Matches written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-03-09 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 further 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.
Download or read book Vox written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-08-24 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER Vox is a novel that remaps the territory of sex—sex solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. It is an erotic classic that places Nicholson Baker firmly in the first rank of major American writers.
Book Synopsis The Everlasting Story of Nory by : Nicholson Baker
Download or read book The Everlasting Story of Nory written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-03-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now turns his attention on a 9-year-old American girl and produces a novel as enchantingly idiosyncratic as any he has written. Nory Winslow wants to be a dentist or a designer of pop-up books. She likes telling stories and inventing dolls. She has nightmares about teeth, which may explain her career choice. She is going to school in England, where she is mocked for her accent and her friendship with an unpopular girl, and she has made it through the year without crying. Nicholson Baker follows Nory as she interacts with her parents and peers, thinks about God and death-watch beetles, and dreams of cows with pointed teeth. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll's Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.
Download or read book Substitute written by Nicholson Baker and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **A New York Times Bestseller** “May be the most revealing depiction of the American contemporary classroom that we have to date." —Garret Keizer, The New York Times Book Review Bestselling author Nicholson Baker, in pursuit of the realities of American public education, signed up as a substitute teacher in a Maine public school district. 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. He awoke to the dispatcher’s five-forty a.m. phone call and headed to one of several nearby schools; when he got there, he did his best to follow lesson plans and help his students get something done. What emerges from Baker’s experience is a complex, often touching deconstruction of public schooling in America: children swamped with overdue assignments, overwhelmed by the marvels and distractions of social media and educational technology, and staff who weary themselves trying to teach in step with an often outmoded or overly ambitious standard curriculum. In Baker’s hands, the inner life of the classroom is examined anew—mundane worksheets, recess time-outs, surprise nosebleeds, rebellions, griefs, jealousies, minor triumphs, kindergarten show-and-tell, daily lessons on everything from geology to metal tech to the Holocaust—as he and his pupils struggle to find ways to get through the day. Baker is one of the most inventive and remarkable writers of our time, and Substitute, filled with humor, honesty, and empathy, may be his most impressive work of nonfiction yet.
Download or read book House of Holes written by Nicholson Baker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-18 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visit the House of Holes, where the motto is PLEASURE FIRST, and discover a solution to every sexual problem, insight into every sexual intrigue, or play out your greatest sexual fantasy. Men can begin with a 'good, friendly penis scrub', take the magic sperm sniff test, or visit the Porndecahedron. Greedy women can visit the Hall of the Penises, shy women can order a partner with a 'voluntary head detachment', curious couples can investigate each other further with a 'cross crotchal interplasmic transfer'. But ladies, watch out for the Pearloiner, who might just steal from you what you cherish most …
Download or read book B & Me written by J.C. Hallman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A love letter to the book as a physical object, a source of intellectual ardor, and a form of emotional salvation” (Salon)—and a nod to U and I, Nicholson Baker’s classic memoir about John Updike—from an award-winning author called “wonderfully bright” by The New York Times Book Review. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker wrote U and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is writer out there in the world that you must read. B & Me is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker…and discovering himself in the process. Our relationship to books in the digital age, the role of art in an increasingly commodified world, the power great writing has to change us, these are at the core of Hallman’s investigation of Baker—questions he’s grappled with, values he’s come to doubt. But in reading Baker’s work, Hallman discovers the key to overcoming the malaise that had been plaguing him, through the books themselves and what he finds and contemplates in his attempts to understand them and their enigmatic author. B & Me is literary self-archaeology: an irreverent, incisive story of one reader’s desperate quest to restore passion to literature, and all the things he learns along the way. “A wide-ranging and idiosyncratic career survey for Nicholson Baker’s work, a love letter to the act of reading, and a commentary on the modern novel, this is a book that readers will absolutely adore” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
Download or read book Checkpoint written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2005-04-12 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Nicholson Baker, best-selling author of Vox and the most original writer of his generation, his most controversial novel yet.
Download or read book U and I written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1992-02-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.
Download or read book Vintage Baker written by Nicholson Baker and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker has established himself as one of our most brilliant observers of everyday experience. With his keen perception, flawless prose, and endless wit, he has composed both fiction and nonfiction that has become an essential part of our literature. Vintage Baker contains generous selections from the novels Vox, The Fermata, The Mezzanine, and A Box of Matches; essays from The Size of Thoughts; and portions of the NBCC award winner Doublefold. Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers, presented in attractive, affordable paperback editions.
