Nicholson Baker

Baker first made a name for himself in the late 80s, with a series of short but dense novels that mapped the detail of daily life right down to the aglets at the ends of your shoelaces. Normally, this kind of observational detail is the territory of serious psychedelic drug users—but Baker is nothing if not sober and highly readable, and he therefore comes off as a loveable and obsessive eccentric. The fountainhead of the Baker canon is simple, encouraging, and humane—the conviction that there are worlds inside worlds all around us, and an infinite number of stories hidden in the finite. With Box of Matches, Baker returns to fiction, after a productive five-year sally into nonfiction. (Last year’s Double Fold was a brilliant study of how American libraries are trashing their paper collections. It was also an incidental survey of the history of American newspapers that landed him a National Book Critics Circle Award.) Early indications are that the plot is as thin as ever, and the detail is thick and heavy—just the way you want it in a Baker novel. Ruminator, (651) 699-0587, ruminator.com