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A Box of Matches
A man gets up earlier and earlier each day dresses in the dark makes his coffee and lights the fire with a box of matches. Then he rummages through the thoughts that crowd his head and preoccupy him. Here is mid-life domesticated man whose thoughts veer brilliantly from love and marriage to firelighters and suicide in the twinkling of an eye. This is Baker at his best humorous and observant revealing the underlying truths about the ephemerality of life the joy of small things the darkness just the other side of everyday life - all human life in a box of matches.
€ 19,10 -
Mezzanine
“A seriously funny book.”—Salman Rushdie “It pulverized me.”—Hernan Diaz An elegant new edition of Nicholson Baker’s stunning and highly influential first novel, a witty and boundlessly inventive homage to the profound, neglected details of everyday working life The Mezzanine is a novel told through one man’s ride up an escalator in the office building where he works. In the hands of Nicholson Baker, the bestselling and award-winning author of Vox and The Anthologist, this journey is transformed into a stylistically dazzling reappraisal of the objects and rituals of our lives. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one’s shoes, Baker at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. His sharp storytelling and existential humor bring clarity to the odd angles of the ordinary. Since its first publication in 1988, this novel has become a perennial favorite of readers and writers looking to better understand our uncanny everyday, and has become a cult classic of modern literature. In less than 150 brilliant pages, The Mezzanine manages to wryly interrogate the logic of modernity, celebrate the strange reality of life in the 1980s, and express something of the profundity of human existence.
€ 16,50 -
Baseless
A major new work, a hybrid of history, journalism, and memoir, about the quagmire that is of the Freedom of Information Act-FOIA-and the horrifying government corruptions and secrets it often conceals, from one of America's most celebrated writers Eight years ago, while investigating the possibility that the United States had used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker requested a series of Air Force documents from the early 1950s under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Years went by, and he got no response. Rather than wait forever, Baker set out to keep a personal journal of what it feels like to try to write about major historical events in a world of pervasive redactions, witheld records, and glacially slow governmental responses. The result is one of the most original and daring works of nonfiction in recent memory, a singular and mesmerizing narrative that tunnels into the history of some of the darkest and most shameful plans and projects of the CIA, the Air Force, and the presidencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.Baker assembles what he learns, piece by piece, about Project Baseless, a crash Pentagon program begun in the early fifties that aimed to achieve "an Air Force-wide combat capability in biological and chemical warfare at the earliest possible date." Along the way, he unearths stories of balloons carrying crop disease, leaflet bombs filled with feathers, suicidal scientists, leaky centrifuges, paranoid political-warfare tacticians, insane experiments on animals and humans, weaponized ticks, ferocious propaganda battles with China, and cover and deception plans meant to trick the Kremlin into ramping up its germ-warfare program. At the same time, Baker tells the stories of the heroic journalists and lawyers who have devoted their energies to wresting documentary evidence from goverment repositories, and he shares anecdotes from his daily life in Maine feeding his dogs and watching the morning light. The result is an astonishing and utterly disarming story about waiting, bureaucracy, the horrors of war, and, above all, the cruel secrets that the United States government seems determined to keep forever from its citizens.Story Locale: Maine
€ 18,50 -
Checkpoint
Two men - Jay and Ben - sit in a Washington hotel room. Jay has called his old friend Ben there - to tell him why and how he wants to kill the President. Jay is a bit of a loser (he's lost his girlfriend his job his car) generally easy-going but now he's on edge and he's angry - and he's acquired some radio-controlled flying saws and is working on a boulder with a depleted uranium centre- but he also has a gun and bullets. Ben is the voice of liberal reason with a job and a family. Jay switches on a tape machine and the two men argue. Well Ben tries feebly to reason or cajole while Jay rants and rages about everything from the horror of what happened at that southern Iraq checkpoint where US forces opened fire on a Shiite family in a Land Rover killing most of them and decapitating two young girls; to the iniquities of the present administration Bush Cheney Rumsfeld et al. and abortion (if they're against abortion how come they can kill women and children?) not to mention the napalm-like substance ('improved fire jelly') used in bombs in Iraq. Their dialogue veers from chilling and serious to wacky and crazed (Bush says Jay is 'one dead armadillo'). Checkpoint is a novel about a man pushed to the extremes by a writer who is clearly angry. Like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 it takes the temperature of America just below the surface and finds it at boiling point.
€ 18,80 -
The Mezzanine
The Mezzanine is the story of one man's lunch hour. Pondering life's littlest questions - why does one shoelace always wear out before the other? Whatever happened to the paper drinking straw? - our narrator interrogates the inner-workings of corporate living as he traipses his way down escalators to the first floor and through the mundaneness of office life.Mixing humour with the existentialism that surrounds all our working lives, The Mezzanine is a classic work of modern American literature.
€ 13,00 -
U AND I
When Nicholson Baker, one of the most linguistically talented writers in America, set out to write a book about John Updike, the result was no ordinary biography. Instead Baker's account of his relationship with his hero is a hilarious story of ambition, obsession, talent and neurosis, alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing. More memoir than literary criticism, Baker is excruciatingly honest, and U & I reveals at least as much about Baker himself as it does about his idol. Written twenty years before Updike's death in 2009, U & I is a very smart and extremely funny exploration of the debts we owe our heroes.
€ 11,50 -
The Paul Chowder Chronicles
TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME, BOTH OF NICHOLSON BAKER'S BRILLIANT NOVELS FEATURING BELOVED HERO AND POET PAUL CHOWDER A New York Times notable book and a national bestseller, Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist introduces his quirkiest and most unforgettable protagonist yet, the "erudite, unpretentious, and often hilarious” (The New Yorker) Paul Chowder.Chowder really needs to write an introduction to his new anthology of verse, Only Rhyme—it's the first work his editor has sent him in months—but he's having a hard time getting started. Not only is his career floundering, but his girlfriend, Roz, just moved out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Chowder can't keep his mind from drifting to the sufferings of the great poets, from Tennyson and Yeats to Roethke, Merwin, to every poet who's been published in The New Yorker. As he ponders the strange power and musicality of language, and adjusts to his newly single life, Chowder's introduction slowly but surely begins to take shape.A wholly entertaining and beguiling love story, and the first novel in the chronicles of Paul Chowder—which is followed by Traveling Sprinkler in this same volume—The Anthologist is "a loving and superbly witty homage to poetryand to life” (The Boston Globe).
€ 16,50 -
Haus der Löcher
Alice in Pornoland.Was ist das Haus der Löcher für ein Ort? Nicholson Baker, Spezialist für ungewöhnliche Erotik, hat ihn entdeckt. Es ist ein Resort, küstennah, sonnenbeschienen, luxuriös, mit angeschlossenem Vergnügungspark. Ein Ort, an dem unsere geheimsten sexuellen Wünsche erfüllt werden, oder gar solche, die wir nie zu wünschen wagten.Und wie kommen wir dort hin? So ähnlich wie Alice ins Wunderland: durch den dritten Trockner von links im Waschsalon um die Ecke, durch den Trinkhalm unseres Cocktails - oder einfach, indem wir dieses Buch aufschlagen und kopfüber eintauchen.
€ 9,99 -
House of Holes
In the New York Times bestseller House of Holes, Nicholson Baker, “one of the most beautiful, original, and ingenious prose stylists to have come along in decades” (The New York Times Magazine), returns to the terrain that made him famous with a gleefully provocative, off-the-charts erotic novel that is unlike anything you’ve read—“a filthy tour de force” (Time).Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. So begins Nicholson Baker’s fuse-blowing sexual escapade—a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in a pleasure resort where normal rules don’t apply. House of Holes, one of the most talked-about books in recent memory, is a gleefully provocative novel sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.
€ 16,80 -
Vox
Vox is the story of two voices, his and hers: two strangers who, having met on a telephone chat-line, switch to a private, one-on-one connection - and find it impossible to hang up. Literate, humorous, erotic, Vox is a classic of bedtime reading.
€ 11,50 -
Room Temperature
On an autumn day, at around three-fifteen in the afternoon, Mike sits down in the rocking chair to feed his infant daughter, Bug. The novel that unfolds over the next twenty minutes of Mike's life is a warmly comic masterpiece of observation, reflection and digression. Baker brilliantly recreates Mike's roving mind, with its tangential thoughts about peanut butter and its big questions about fatherhood, marriage, and love. The result is surprisingly thrilling to read: funny, linguistically exuberant, tender and alive to the small mysteries and pleasures of everyday life.
€ 10,50 -
Room Temperature
In his second novel, Baker turns a young father's feeding-time reverie into a catalog of the minutiae of domestic love.
€ 16,50