Nicholson Baker Books in Order

During a lunch-hour escalator ride, an office worker drifts through memories and theories about shoelaces, milk cartons, straws, and office life. Tiny observations become funny, oddly moving reflections on time, habit, and modern routine.

While feeding his baby daughter a bottle, Mike wanders through memories of childhood, marriage, and new parenthood. A few quiet minutes open into a tender, funny meditation on family life and the richness of ordinary things.

Baker writes about his obsession with John Updike, memory, and the odd intimacy between reader and writer. It is part literary self-portrait, part comic essay on influence, admiration, and getting things wrong.

Two strangers meet on a phone-sex line and talk through fantasies, awkwardness, language, and desire. The book is intimate and talky, more interested in voice and connection than shock for its own sake.

Arno Strine can stop time, and he uses that impossible gift to indulge voyeurism while explaining himself in elaborate detail. Baker turns the premise into a comic, unsettling novel about desire, control, and self-deception.

This essay collection moves from nail clippers and card catalogs to punctuation, poetry databases, and the word lumber. Baker turns small subjects into big, funny investigations of language, memory, and how attention works.

Nory Winslow, a curious young girl, fills her days with fears, jokes, inventions, and private theories. Baker follows her mind closely, making ordinary childhood feel strange, funny, and vividly alive.

Baker investigates libraries' destruction of newspapers and books during the microfilming era. Part reported argument and part preservation crusade, it follows his anger, research, and attempts to save paper records before they vanish.

Emmett wakes before dawn, lights a fire with one match, drinks coffee, and thinks. His predawn ritual becomes a gentle, searching novel about marriage, children, mortality, and the deep strangeness of daily life.

In a Washington hotel room, two old friends argue through one man's plan to kill President George W. Bush. Told entirely in dialogue, it is tense, provocative, and sharply focused on anger, talk, and moral limits.

This sampler gathers excerpts from *Vox*, *The Fermata*, *The Mezzanine*, *A Box of Matches*, *The Size of Thoughts*, and *Double Fold*. It works as a compact introduction to Baker's range, from intimate fiction to argumentative nonfiction.

This live audio anthology brings together humorous short fiction by several writers, including Baker. It is a quick, lively listen, and a handy way to sample his comic sensibility alongside other sharp contemporary voices.

Built from dated fragments, speeches, articles, diaries, and official records, this history revisits the years leading into World War II. Baker challenges familiar narratives and keeps attention on civilians, pacifists, and mounting catastrophe.

Paul Chowder is supposed to write the introduction to his poetry anthology, *Only Rhyme*, but keeps swerving into memories, heartbreak, and long thoughts about meter and rhyme. It is funny, restless, and quietly moving.

In a surreal pleasure resort where the normal rules collapse, characters fall into wildly comic sexual adventures. This is Baker at his most explicit and outrageous, but also playful, inventive, and strangely light on its feet.

This essay collection ranges from politics and pacifism to lawns, telephones, paper mills, gondolas, and personal memory. It is a roomy introduction to Baker's nonfiction mind, curious, argumentative, funny, and unexpectedly tender.

Paul Chowder returns at fifty-five, turning from poetry to songwriting while trying to steady his life and sort out his feelings for Roz. Music, politics, and everyday habits all flow through his rambling, vulnerable voice.

To see American public schools from the inside, Baker trained as an on-call substitute in Maine and spent weeks covering classes. The result is a detailed, humane portrait of classrooms, teachers, distractions, and small daily victories.

Starting with Freedom of Information Act requests, Baker digs into U.S. biological and chemical warfare programs and the stonewalling around them. The book mixes archival pursuit, daily journal, and a growing sense of how secrecy distorts history.

In this memoir, Baker teaches himself to draw and paint more seriously, recording frustrations, small breakthroughs, and the pleasure of really looking. It is a quiet book about practice, art, and paying attention.