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Understanding Nicholson Baker by Arthur Michael Saltzman Pdf
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.
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
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.
“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.
"The Anthologist" captures all the warmth, wit, and extraordinary prose stylethat have made Baker--a National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author--anAmerican master.
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.
Bestselling author Baker, "who writes like no one else in America" ("Newsweek"), has assembled his best nonfiction writing over the last 15 years, a trove of original and provocative pieces.
An accomplished poet tries his hand at songwriting, Quaker meetings, and tobacco experiments while he copes with his ex-girlfriend's new relationship with a local NPR radio host.
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
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.
Since the 1950s, some of the greatest libraries have dismantled much of their collections of original bound newspapers and books, replacing them with microfilmed copies. In this work the real motives behind the dismantling of our heritage is examined.
**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.
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.
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.