The Book Is a Time Machine

When we are not actually holding them, books are things over which we like to wring our hands. They stand, in their very solidity, for what might be precarious ...

The Big Picture: Jews and Trump

Exit polls conducted during the 2016 election yielded a fact about the political allegiances of American Jews that was at once totally unsurprising and potentially misleading: over 70 percent of ...

Sleep and Synchronicity

Two spectacularly haunting new works of fiction share a frightening and resonant premise: a world in which sleep is disappearing. Insomnia has a storied history, of course, as both ailment and plot ...

Songs of Myself

Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker’s new novel, Traveling Sprinkler, wants badly to compose a pop song. Having already purchased a guitar, lessons, a 49-key MIDI keyboard, Logic music ...

Dollars and Sex

House of Holes, Nicholson Baker’s celebrated return to dirty fiction, conjures an alternate sexual universe, where a broad range of heterosexual men and women (and one detached male body part) find ...