Nicholson Baker, who “writes like no one else in America” (), here assembles his best short pieces from the last fifteen years.

Through all these pieces, many written for , and , Baker shines the light of an inexpugnable curiosity. is a keen-minded, generous-spirited compendium by a modern American master.

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, is a very smart and extremely funny exploration of the debts we owe our heroes.

Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex-solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, Vox is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers. Reading tour.

With Calvin Baker’s first novel, , he was named a “Notable First Novelist” by Time magazine. Since his second novel, , Baker has continued to be acclaimed by the major media from the to. Now, with Dominion, Baker has written a lush, incantatory novel about three generations of an African American family in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. Dominion tells the story of the Merian family who, at the close of the seventeenth century, settle in the wilderness of the Carolinas. Jasper is the patriarch, freed from bondage, who manages against all odds to build a thriving estate with his new wife and two sons — one enslaved, the other free. For one hundred years, the Merian family struggles against the natural (and occasionally supernatural) world, colonial politics, the injustices of slavery, the Revolutionary War and questions of fidelity and the heart. Footed in both myth and modernity, Calvin Baker crafts a rich, intricate and moving novel, with meditations on God, responsibility, and familial legacies. While masterfully incorporating elements of the world’s oldest and greatest stories, the end result is a bold contemplation of the origins of America.

Harper Roland has abandoned his job as a war correspondent, and returned home a weary, jaded 37-year-old. Uncertain of the future but determined to move forward with his life, he begins a search for enduring love-hoping he will also regain the ability to see the beauty of the world.

Along the way, he meets an intellectually gifted but emotionally absent doctor, a beautiful Parisian artist who burns too hot to the touch, and a human rights lawyer who has left New York in search of a more centered life.

The novel's sweeping tale encompasses four continents-where prior assumptions are constantly tested, and men who cling too passionately to certainty unleash destruction-and ultimately leads Harper back to the chaos he was trying to escape. The result is a startlingly fresh view of the contemporary world, in which place and history are mere starting points for the deeper journey into the geography of the human heart.

Calvin Baker is the author of the brilliantly-acclaimed novels Naming the New World, Once Two Heroes and Dominion, which was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award, a New York Magazine Critics’ Pick and New York Daily News Best Book of the Year. He has taught at Columbia University, in the Graduate School of the Arts, and at the University of Leipzig, Germany as Picador Professor of American Studies. He grew up in Chicago and currently lives in New York.

The author resides in Pismo Beach, California, with a thoroughly unpleasant parrot. Of her debut tale in Asimov’s she says, “ ‘Noble Mold’ is the first published story in a series about the immortal agents of a twenty-fourth-century salvage company run by an all-powerful cabal of scientists and investment bankers. There really was a Fr. Rubio living at Santa Barbara Mission at the time this story covers, and his portrait can be seen at the museum there, smirking out at the visitors with an expression that implies that he knows more than he’s telling…

Die gegen Menzoberranzan geeinten Kräfte beginnen, Gestalt anzunehmen, und die Gefahr für die Zivilisation der Drow ist schrecklicher als bisher gedacht. Der Weg zu Lolths Geheimnissen führt von den undurchdringlichen Schatten des Unterreichs zu den entlegenen Winkeln der unwirtlichen Obenveit und ist ebenso unvorhersehbar wie tödlich.

Zusammen mit zwei Drow, die die letzten Überlebenden Ched Nasads sein könnten, haben die Forscher aus Menzoberranzan viel erfahren, doch für jede Antwort, die sie erhalten, stellen sich tausend neue Fragen. Sie müssen in der Hoffnung, er könne ihnen die Göttin schneller finden helfen, einen rivalisierenden Priester aufsuchen, doch kann je ein Dunkelelf einem anderen trauen?

Der dritte Roman einer epischen sechsteiligen Reihe, die der fruchtbaren Phantasie R. A. Salvatores und einer handverlesenen Gruppe der talentiertesten Autoren des Genres entspringt. Bringen Sie mit ihnen zusammen Licht in die schwärzesten Winkel der Vergessenen Reiche, um so die Schatten dort nur noch tiefer zu machen.

When war breaks out in Europe in 1939, a young, unknown writer journeys from his home in neutral Ireland to conflict-ridden Paris and is drawn into the maelstrom. With him we experience the hardships yet stubborn vibrancy at the heart of Europe during the Nazis' rise to power; his friendships with James Joyce and other luminaries; his quietly passionate devotion to the Frenchwoman who will become his lifelong companion; his secret work for the French Resistance and narrow escapes from the Gestapo; his flight from occupied Paris to the countryside; and the rubble of his life after liberation. And through it all we are witness to workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express his experience of this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into timeless art.

In 2014, after a brief orientation course and a few fingerprinting sessions, Nicholson Baker became an on-call substitute teacher in a Maine public school district. He awoke to the dispatcher's five-forty a.m. phone call and headed to one of several nearby schools; when he got there, he did his best to follow lesson plans and help his students get something done. What emerges from Baker s experience is a complex, often touching deconstruction of public schooling in America: children swamped with overdue assignments, overwhelmed by the marvels and distractions of social media and educational technology, and staff who weary themselves trying to teach in step with an often outmoded or overly ambitious standard curriculum. In Baker s hands, the inner life of the classroom is examined anew mundane worksheets, recess time-outs, surprise nosebleeds, rebellions, griefs, jealousies, minor triumphs, daily lessons on everything from geology to metal tech to the Holocaust to kindergarten show-and-tell as the author and his pupils struggle to find ways to get through the day. Baker is one of the most inventive and remarkable writers of our time, and "Substitute," filled with humor, honesty, and empathy, may be his most impressive work of nonfiction yet."

SUMMARY: New in the "wonderful" (Green Bay Press Gazette) Dolls to Die For mystery series. When doll restoration artist Gretchen Birch finds the owner of a dollhouse shop murdered, she winds up in the thick of a mystery of miniature proportions.

SUMMARY: While attending her first major doll show, Gretchen Birch, a doll restoration artist, is forced to investigate the murder of a sleazy reporter when the killer begins sending her boxes of Kewpie dolls with cryptic, threatening messages that contain the clues to cracking this case. Original.

After a hundred years, Jack Ravenwild—thief, sorcerer, scoundrel, and accidental hero—is released from a magical confinement, only to fall into the hands of the marquise Dresimil Chûmavh, ruler of an exiled drow clan who sees an opportunity in Jack.

Through guile and subterfuge, the wily Jack escapes the drow to discover a new world waiting in his old stomping grounds, Raven's Bluff, a city equally abounding in fortune and danger. Unfortunately for Jack, he is best at stirring up the latter. His former archenemy the Warlord Myrkyssa Jelan is at large, and she isn't the type to forgive and forget. And worst of all, the drow aren't done with Jack and they mean to get him back.