1996
First Published
3.82
Average Rating
362
Number of Pages
The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.
Avg Rating
3.82
Number of Ratings
640
5 STARS
26%
4 STARS
38%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
Author
Nicholson Baker
Author · 20 books
Nicholson Baker is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. He was born in Manhattan in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He has published sixteen books—including The Mezzanine (1988), U and I (1991), Human Smoke (2008), The Anthologist (2009), and Substitute (2016)—and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Review of Books, Best American Short Stories, and Best American Essays. He has received a National Book Critics Circle award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, the Herman Hesse Prize, and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999, Baker and his wife, Margaret Brentano (co-author with Baker of The World on Sunday, 2005), founded the American Newspaper Repository in order to save a large collection of U.S. newspapers, including a run of Joseph Pulitzer's influential daily, the New York World. In 2004 the Repository’s holdings became a gift to Duke University. Baker and Brentano have two children; they live on the Penobscot River in Maine.
