Nicholson Baker

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

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.

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.

Both funny and serious, this novel recounts what is really going on in the head of domesticated mid-life man. As he gets up earlier and earlier each day, he rummages through the thoughts which crowd his head and preoccupy him: love and marriage, firelighters and suicide, and ant-farms.

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.

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.

I frokostpausen mellem rulletrappeturen ned og op igen kommer en kontormand i New York i tankerne vittigt og underfundigt omkring civilisationens vidundere: mælkekartoner hæfteklammemaskiner elektriske håndtørrere sugerør isterningebakkerog meget mere

The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience.

This is the story of Arno Strine, a modest temporary typist, who 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 very provocative, very funny and altogether morally confused piece of work.

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.

Zwei Menschen telefonieren bis tief in die Nacht, gestehen sich ihre intimsten Träume, Geheimnisse und Wünsche. Mit all ihren Phantasien von Versandhaus-Reizwäsche und Video-Erotik, bei all ihren Geschichten von provozierendem Flirt und zielstrebiger Verführung sind es die scheinbar banalen, flüchtigen erotischen Anreize des Lebens, die Jim und Abby am meisten faszinieren: die zarte Glätte von Abbys Haut nach dem Einölen, der langsam ausgeblendete Popsong im Radio, den sie sehnsuchtsvoll verklingen hörte; der jähe Blick auf die vorbeihuschenden Brüste der Autofahrerinnen, wenn Jim als Fußgänger an der Ampel auf Grün wartet.

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.

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