The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

Baker, Nicholson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679776249 ISBN 13: 9780679776246

Publisher: Vintage, 1997

Synopsis

Novelist Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine and Vox and called by Vanity Fair "the best American writer of his generation, " here collects over a decade's worth of essays and journalism, including his controversial and highly praised 1994 article on the destruction of library card catalogs. His subjects range from the internals of the movie projector to the emotional tribulations of reading aloud; from the disappearance of hybrid punctuation to the mechanics of changing one's mind; from the lexicography of dirty talk to the manufacture of the fingernail clipper. There is a wedding address, a study of the not-so-random books that are used as props in mail-order catalogs, and a recipe. The final essay, which appears in print here for the first time, pursues through several centuries of prose and poetry the vagaries of the word lumber as a metaphor for the contents of the human mind, in what becomes in the telling a dazzlingly pedantic case study of the fanaticism of scholarship and the beauty that can reside within a piece of ordinary language.

About this title

About the Author:

Nicholson Baker has published five novels-The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, and The Everlasting Story of Nory-and two works of nonfiction, U and I and The Size of Thoughts. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.

From the Inside Flap:

The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0679776249
• ISBN 13: 9780679776246
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368