Nicholson Baker

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. Nearly every morning, he awoke to the dispatcher's five-forty a.m. phone call and headed to a nearby school. When he got there, he did his best to follow lesson plans and help his students get something done. In Baker's hands, the inner life of the classroom is examined anew -- mundane...

Human Smoke delivers a closely textured, deeply moving indictment of the treasured myths that have romanticized much of the 1930s and '40s. Incorporating meticulous research and well-documented sources-including newspaper and magazine articles, radio speeches, memoirs, and diaries-the book juxtaposes hundreds of interrelated moments of decision, brutality, suffering, and mercy. Vivid glimpses of political leaders and their dissenters illuminate and...

In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel first published in 1986 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback the author of Vox and The Fermata 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. Nicholson Baker's...

"Ten years into researching a book about the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker was frustrated and disheartened. In the course of his research, he had become deeply disillusioned with the process of FOIA requests. He has been forced to wait years in some cases, while other requests have been answered only with documents rendered inscrutable, or even illegible, by copious redactions. Rather...