Nicholson Baker

I've written eighteen books, plus an art book (The World on Sunday) that I published with my wife Margaret Brentano. The most recent one is Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art (2024). Before that came Baseless (2020), about Cold War secrets, and before that was Substitute (2016), about working as a substitute teacher in Maine schools. Some earlier books are The Anthologist (2009), a novel about a poet trying to write an introduction to an anthology of rhyming verse; A Box of Matches (2004), about getting up early and making a fire; Human Smoke (2008), a bestselling attempt to look at the beginning of World War II in a new way, and U and I (1991), about the vagaries and jealousies of the writing life. My first novel, The Mezzanine, about a man riding an escalator on his lunch hour, came out in 1988 and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Vox (1992), was a phone-sex novel, and I've produced two other erotic jamborees: The Fermata, about time-stopping (1994); and House of Holes, about a surreal resort (2011). My book Double Fold, about libraries (2001), won a National Book Critics Circle Award. Occasionally I write for magazines. I was born in New York City and grew up in Rochester, New York. At Haverford College I majored in English. I live in Maine, near Bangor, with my wife; we have two grown children.