The Everlasting Story Of Nory

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 or a designer of pop-up books. She likes telling stories and inventing dolls. She has nightmares about teeth, which may explain her career choice. She is going to school in England, where she is mocked for her accent and her friendship with an unpopular girl, and she has made it through the year without crying. Nicholson Baker follows Nory as she interacts with her parents and peers, thinks about God and death-watch beetles, and dreams of cows with pointed teeth. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll's Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.

Nory is a nine-year-old American girl spending a year in an English cathedral town, based closely on Ely. She relates her impressions, tells us her favourite stories and dreams, comes to terms with the intricate politics of school friendships and explores the town.

Lauded by Vanity Fair as "the best writer of our generation," Nicholson Baker has earned a complex and controversial reputation among contemporary American authors. In addition to being celebrated as a prose miniaturist for such works as The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Baker is known for highly erotic works such as Vox and The Fermata. In Understanding Nicholson Baker, Arthur Saltzman engages these provocative fictions as well as Baker's nonfiction to show how his seemingly disparate works derive from and demonstrate an unremitting zeal for explicit detail, along with descriptive obsessiveness and linguistic virtuosity.

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 work and Baker’s well-known explanatory power, Double Fold reveals a secret history of microfilm lobbyists, former CIA agents, and warehouses where priceless archives are destroyed with a machine called a guillotine. Baker argues passionately for preservation, even cashing in his own retirement account to save one important archive–all twenty tons of it. Written the brilliant narrative style that Nicholson Baker fans have come to expect, Double Fold is a persuasive and often devastating book that may turn out to be The Jungle of the American library system.

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 life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.

“A love letter to the book as a physical object, a source of intellectual ardor, and a form of emotional salvation” (Salon)—and a nod to U and I, Nicholson Baker’s classic memoir about John Updike—from an award-winning author called “wonderfully bright” by The New York Times Book Review. Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker wrote U and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is writer out there in the world that you must read. B & Me is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker…and discovering himself in the process. Our relationship to books in the digital age, the role of art in an increasingly commodified world, the power great writing has to change us, these are at the core of Hallman’s investigation of Baker—questions he’s grappled with, values he’s come to doubt. But in reading Baker’s work, Hallman discovers the key to overcoming the malaise that had been plaguing him, through the books themselves and what he finds and contemplates in his attempts to understand them and their enigmatic author. B & Me is literary self-archaeology: an irreverent, incisive story of one reader’s desperate quest to restore passion to literature, and all the things he learns along the way. “A wide-ranging and idiosyncratic career survey for Nicholson Baker’s work, a love letter to the act of reading, and a commentary on the modern novel, this is a book that readers will absolutely adore” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Improving the quality of your writing starts with rethinking your assumptions and developing healthier writing habits. This book will help you do both. Become a Better Writer: How to Write with Clarity and Simplicity is a practical guide for those who wish to write more clearly and concisely. Drawing on their extensive experience as writers and editors, the authors discuss tools and tips for making your writing accessible and meaningful to your target audience. The book is readable and engaging, covering different kinds of writing (including reports, essays, emails, novels and speeches) across a wide range of subjects. The examples discussed are derived from real-world material and are particularly relevant to the African context. The book will be especially useful to writers of non-fiction.