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...

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...

"Ten years into researching a book about the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker was frustrated and disheartened. In the course of his research, he had become deeply disillusioned with the process of FOIA requests. He has been forced to wait years in some cases, while other requests have been answered only with documents rendered inscrutable, or even illegible, by copious redactions. Rather...

Nicholson Baker's novel, The Mezannine, turned a lunch hour into a postmodern version of The Odyssey. In Room Temperature, originally published by Grove Press in 1984, Baker takes the reader even greater distance in the course of twenty minutes, although his narrator is obliged to be stationary, as he is giving his baby daughter her bottle. Though all in the room is still, the narrator's mind is not, and in inspired moments of mental flight, Mike's...

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...

Selected Short's most popular volume! Over three hours of stories to tickle your funny bone. Nicholson Baker's "Subsoil" performed by Thomas Gibson A darkly comic thriller about a tractor historian besieged by man-eating potatoes. David Schickler's "Jamaica" performed by Isaiah Sheffer A man with his head stuck between the banisters has no choice but to listen in on his wife's "Gorgon Book Club." Neil Gaiman's "Chivalry" performed by Christina Pickles...