Nicholson Baker with Michael Silverblatt, 20 January 2010 – Audio

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 20, 2010.

Nicholson Baker’s recently published Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is a chronological juxtaposition of discrete moments from 1892 to December 31, 1941, based on accounts from contemporary reports of Britain’s terror campaign of repeatedly bombing German cities even before the London blitz. Known for his original approach to a subject, his first novel, The Mezzanine, recounts one afternoon in the life of a man riding an escalator on his way to buy a shoelace and his second, Room Temperature, is about a father feeding a bottle to his six-month-old daughter, while Vox transcribes a long telephone conversation between two people who meet over a phone-sex call-in line.