Nicholson Baker is an American novelist and essayist, known for his inventive and lavishly descriptive prose. His reputation is a complex and even somewhat contradictory one, in that it rests, on the one hand, upon his fixation with seemingly trivial subject matters and, on the other, upon the significant controversy aroused by much of his work. His critical reputation is that of a supreme prose stylist, and many commentators have remarked that, though his books (aside from two non-fiction books and a collection of essays,

(1997)) tend to be presented as fiction, he is essentially an essayist. The novelist John Banville, for instance, reviewing

in

, commended Baker’s luminous prose, comparing it to that of both Nabokov and Joyce, but…

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Citation: O'Connell, Mark. "Nicholson Baker". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 September 2010 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5216, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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