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When Nicholson Baker, one of the most linguistically talented
writers in America, set out to write a book about John Updike, the
result was no ordinary biography. Instead Baker's account of his
relationship with his hero is a hilarious story of ambition,
obsession, talent and neurosis, alternately self-deprecating and
self-aggrandizing. More memoir than literary criticism, Baker is
excruciatingly honest, and U & I reveals at least as much about
Baker himself as it does about his idol. Written twenty years
before Updike's death in 2009, U & I is a very smart and
extremely funny exploration of the debts we owe our heroes.
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Vox (Paperback, 2 Ed)
Nicholson Baker
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R236
R210
Discovery Miles 2 100
Save R26 (11%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Vox is the story of two voices, his and hers: two strangers who,
having met on a telephone chat-line, switch to a private,
one-on-one connection - and find it impossible to hang up.
Literate, humorous, erotic, Vox is a classic of bedtime reading.
The Mezzanine is the story of one man's lunch hour. Pondering
life's littlest questions - why does one shoelace always wear out
before the other? Whatever happened to the paper drinking straw -
our narrator interrogates the inner-workings of corporate living as
he traipses his way down escalators to the first floor and through
the mundaneness of office life. Mixing humour with the
existentialism that surrounds all our working lives, The Mezzanine
is a classic work of modern American literature.
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 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 human experiences.
On an autumn day, at around three-fifteen in the afternoon, Mike
sits down in the rocking chair to feed his infant daughter, Bug.
The novel that unfolds over the next twenty minutes of Mike's life
is a warmly comic masterpiece of observation, reflection and
digression. Baker brilliantly recreates Mike's roving mind, with
its tangential thoughts about peanut butter and its big questions
about fatherhood, marriage, and love. The result is surprisingly
thrilling to read: funny, linguistically exuberant, tender and
alive to the small mysteries and pleasures of everyday life.
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The Labyrinth (Hardcover, Main)
Harold Rosenberg, Nicholson Baker, Saul Steinberg
1
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R918
R761
Discovery Miles 7 610
Save R157 (17%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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The author of the quirky masterpiece The Mezzanine turns a young
father's feeding-time reverie into a dazzling catalog of the
minutiae of domestic love. "A delightful book, homey and
comfortable as a slipper. . . . Every page provokes the shock, or
at least the smile, of recognition".--Washington Post.
Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a
hole in a golf course. So begins Nicholson Baker's fuse-blowing
sexual escapade--a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in
a pleasure resort where normal rules don't apply. "House of Holes,
"one of the most talked-about books in recent memory, is a
gleefully provocative novel sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.
**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, over whelmed 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 work sheets,
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.
Nicholson Baker's new novel 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. Hilarious and totally original, Nicholson Baker's new novel is a triumphant comedy about sexual fantasy and fantastic sexuality.
Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex--solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, Vox is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers. Reading tour.
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.
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The Fermata (Paperback)
Nicholson Baker
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R466
R412
Discovery Miles 4 120
Save R54 (12%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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