The Way the World Works: Essays (35 page)

BOOK: The Way the World Works: Essays
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© ELIAS BAKER

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 and grew up in Rochester, New York. He studied at the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published nine novels, the latest of which is
House of Holes,
and four previous works of nonfiction. His work has appeared in
Best American Short Stories
and
Best American Essays
. A nonfiction work,
Double
Fold,
won a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives with his family in Maine.

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DON’T MISS THESE OTHER GREAT WORKS BY
NICHOLSON BAKER!

A gleefully over-the-top novel set in a pleasure resort, where normal rules don’t apply. Visitors, pulled in via their drinking straws or the dryers in laundromats, can undergo crotchal transfers . . . make love to trees . . . even visit the Groanrooms and the twelve-screen Porndecahedron. Brimful of good nature, wit, and surreal sexual vocabulary,
House of Holes
is sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.

Narrated by a sporadic poet named Paul Chowder,
The Anthologist
is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the staff of
The New Yorker
. What Paul reveals makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives in this tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.

A highly researched and surprising new book about the decades preceding World War II—a superbly assembled narrative that encompasses the vast political, social, religious, and economic landscapes throughout the world,
Human Smoke
is an invaluable work of nonfiction, and an impassioned, persuasive call for peace and pacifism.

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ALSO BY NICHOLSON BAKER

FICTION

House of Holes

The Anthologist

Checkpoint

A Box of Matches

The Everlasting Story of Nory

The Fermata

Vox

Room Temperature

The Mezzanine

NONFICTION

Human Smoke

Double Fold

The Size of Thoughts

U and I

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Copyright © 2012 by Nicholson Baker

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition August 2012

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Designed by Joy O’Meara
Jacket design by Jason Heuer
Jacket illustration of wrench © CSA Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Baker, Nicholson.

The way the world works : essays / Nicholson Baker.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3552.A4325W39 2012

814'.54—dc23

2011052741

ISBN 978-1-4165-7247-3

ISBN 978-1-4165-8398-1 (ebook)

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