The Anthologist Book

The Anthologist captures all the warmth, wit, and extraordinary prose style that have made award-winning author Nicholson Baker an American master.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In a career stretching back more than two decades, Nicholson Baker has repeated himself only once. Room Temperature, his second novel, was arguably a refinement of the navel-gazing technique he brought to near perfection in his first, The Mezzanine. But since then, the only consistent thing about his work has been its delightful, sometimes loopy inconsistency. In a 1999 interview, he compared his zigzagging output to a buffet table: "Sometimes you're at the soup trough, sometimes you're at the salad. It would be nice to be thought of as offering a variety of things, on different kinds of silver salvers."

This is all by way of saying that his follow-up to Human Smoke -- a crazy quilt of anecdotes meant to make the case for pacifism -- is not a thorough debunking of the Spanish-American War. No, Baker has changed gears on us once again. With The Anthologist, we are back on fictional turf, and the focus has shifted from such larger-than-life figures as Churchill, FDR, and Hitler to a minor poet with a savory surname: Paul Chowder.