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 cities for competitions. Friendships grew between the American athletes in their six weeks together. Together, they faced hurdles of financial insecurity, racial inequality, chilly winds, and inadequate diets as they confronted the Soviet Union for the first time. Despite the obstacles, Thane, wearing borrowed socks and borrowed shoes, returned to his small town with an Olympic medal, forever changed by his experiences.
Nicholson Baker, who “writes like no one else in America” (Newsweek), here assembles his best short pieces from the last fifteen years. The Way the World Works, Baker’s second nonfiction collection, r
An accomplished poet tries his hand at songwriting, Quaker meetings, and tobacco experiments while he copes with his ex-girlfriend's new relationship with a local NPR radio host.
A new novel by bestselling author Nicholson Baker reintroduces feckless but hopeful hero Paul Chowder, whose struggle to get his life together is reflected in his steadfast desire to write a pop song,
Turns an ordinary ride up an office escalator into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects--shoelaces, straws, and more. Baker's debut novel, and a favorite amongst many of us here.
An accomplished poet tries his hand at songwriting, Quaker meetings and tobacco experiments while he copes, badly, with his ex-girlfriend's new relationship with a local NPR radio host in this new nov
**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 Ni
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-f
Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. Luna meets a man made of light bulbs at a tanning parlor. So begins Nicholson Baker’s fuse-blowing, sex-positi
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 esc
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
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 hundred
