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 fligh...

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,

Thane Baker grew up in the Kansas Dust Bowl. An Olympic medal winner from his small town gave seven-year-old Thane hopes for his own Olympic glory. Yet a work injury at age fourteen shoved steel behind his kneecap and ended his dreams. When new on his college campus, a coach allowed Thane to walk onto the track team. Three years later, Thane earned an unexpected berth on the 1952 United States Olympic Track and Field Team and traveled to New York City, Helsinki, Finland, and other European...

**Named a Best Book of 2024 by Slate and a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by Literary HubFrom the acclaimed and bestselling writer Nicholson Baker, a deeply personal account of his journey learning how to paint for the first time, and a meditation on the power of art in times of crisis**Nicholson Baker wanted to learn how to paint.In 2019, after years of researching and writing about secret and often horrible government programs for his book Bas...

NATIONAL BESTSELLERVox 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.

TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME, BOTH OF NICHOLSON BAKER’S BRILLIANT NOVELS FEATURING BELOVED HERO AND POET PAUL CHOWDERA New York Times notable book and a national bestseller, Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist introduces his quirkiest and most unforgettable protagonist yet, the “erudite, unpretentious, and often hilarious” (The New Yorker) Paul Chowder.Chowder really needs to write an introduction to his new anthology of verse, O...

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...

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, D...

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 ye...

**“Staggeringly good.” —CounterpunchA 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 ...

**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 ReviewBestselling 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 fingerprint...

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...