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. U and I: A True Story, about his relationship with John Updike, was published in 1991. 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. Baker created the American Newspaper Repository in 1999. He has also written about and edited Wikipedia.