Nicholson Baker

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is an American novelist and essayist.

His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization.

His early novels such as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature were distinguished by their minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness.

Out of a total of ten novels, three are erotica: Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes.

Baker also writes non-fiction books.

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City.

He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in English from Haverford College.

Baker describes himself as an atheist, although he occasionally visits Quaker meetings.

Baker says he has "always had pacifist leanings."

Baker met his wife, Margaret Brentano, in college; they live in Maine and have two grown children.

Baker established a name for himself with the novels The Mezzanine (1988) and Room Temperature (1990).

Both novels have for the most part a very limited time span.

The Mezzanine occurs over the course of an escalator journey and Room Temperature happens while a father feeds his baby daughter.

U and I: A True Story, about his relationship with John Updike, was published in 1991.

U and I: A True Story (1991) is a non-fiction study of how a reader engages with an author's work.

It is partly about Baker's appreciation for the work of John Updike and partly a self-exploration.

Rather than giving a traditional literary analysis, Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point.

All of the Updike quotations used are presented as coming from memory alone, and many are inaccurate, with correct versions and Baker's (later) commentary on the inaccuracies.

Critics group together Vox, The Fermata and House of Holes since they are all erotic novels.

Vox (1992) consists of an episode of phone sex between two young single people on a pay-per-minute chat line.

The book was Baker's first New York Times bestseller and Monica Lewinsky gave a copy to President Bill Clinton when they were having an affair.

In Vox, Baker coined the word femalia.

The Fermata (1994) also addresses erotic life and fantasy.

The protagonist Arno Strine likes to stop time and take off women's clothes.

The work proved controversial with critics.

It was also a bestseller.

In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts.

Baker created the American Newspaper Repository in 1999.

He has also written about and edited Wikipedia.

In 1999, Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries.

He then wrote about the American library system in his 2001 book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper, for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Calw Hermann Hesse Prize for the German translation.

A pacifist, he wrote Human Smoke (2008) about the buildup to World War II.

Baker has published articles in Harper's Magazine, the London Review of Books and The New Yorker, among other periodicals.

House of Holes (2011) is about a fantastical place where all sexual perversions and fetishes are permitted.

It is a collection of stories, more or less connected to each other.

The novellas are erotic in the sense of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron.

The titular House of Holes is a fantasy sex resort in which people can engage in absurd sexual practices, such as groin transference and sex with trees.

Akin to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, people enter the House of Holes through such techniques as tumbling through a clothes dryer or through a drinking straw.

Baker is a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media.

He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, eliminating card catalogs, and destroying old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm.