Product Details
Simon & Schuster, September 2009
Hardcover, 256 pages
ISBN-10: 1416572449
ISBN-13: 9781416572442
Description
The Anthologist is narrated by Paul Chowder -- a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought.
What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry: from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what Paul reveals is astonishing and makes one realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul barely manages to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic, hilarious, and inspired novel.
"[The Anthologist is] startlingly perceptive and ardent...Chowder is possibly the most appealing narrator Baker has invented....You don't have to agree with these opinions; you just savor the tartness of a raw take....Baker is a beautiful writer, and bracing reader of poetry...[a] tremendous success....We read poems because they have a knack for mattering. And how pleasing it is to be so gently, so poetically reminded of that."
-- David Orr, The New York Times Book Review
"[A] light, funny, deeply literary hybrid that functions both as a novel...and a lip-smacking Bakersian treatise on the joys of poetry."
-- Sam Anderson, New York magazine
"Mr. Baker...slips effortlessly into the eager, friendless voice of a man who is every bit as glamorous and dynamic as his name suggests....funny, self-deprecating...delivers unexpectedly illuminating thoughts....But the real beauty of The Anthologist lies in what Paul does not overtly say....enjoy this book's intensity. Don't break its spell."
-- Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"The Anthologist is a slyly intelligent rant about the crazy paradoxes of artistic careerism, and a casual and hilarious series of lessons on poetry...Baker's comic brio and high-energy pace make [Chowder's] lurching progress a winning pleasure."
-- O: the Oprah Magazine
"Baker's best novel to date... You'll laugh, you'll howl, you might even recite. You will learn useful stuff...Chowder is not just one of Baker's great inventions. ...[he] is instantly unforgettable, one of the most concretely realised voices in modern American fiction...Luminous with wisdom both instinctive and learned and...improbably wise. ... every so often the culture produces a writer such as Nicholson Baker, whose every page and every line is inked with a wicked yen for the mischief of lingo."
-- Simon Schama, Financial Times (London)
"[A] novel inside a novel, a life within a life....Baker is a hybrid of past and future. His style has a meditative echo, like a man in a cave walking toward a light on the other end....On paper, in his essays and his fiction, he knows exactly where he is."
-- Susan Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"[The] wonderful new novel The Anthologist...offers something different and (after all the books that have been written about tortured artists) better...The drama and emotion in The Anthologist builds subtly. You become so engaged by Chowder's narrative voice, and his engrossing musings about poetry, that his loneliness and his valiant attempts to cope with despair creep up on you. When they do, you're moved by this sincere, funny, sad man."
-- Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly
"The happiest felicity in a book full of them is that such a loving and superbly witty homage to poetry -- and to life -- could have been achieved only through the prose sentences of Nicholson Baker."
-- William H. Pritchard, The Boston Globe
"In the brisk and entertaining The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker...writes a completely successful novel about poetry....The book is constantly appealing in its witty approach to its ostensible subject -- the charms, rewards and continuing values of poetry....The Anthologist is pure pleasure -- it takes unbridled joy in the love of poetry. It will send readers back to beloved poems or make them search out new ones....provocative fiction."
-- Robert Allen Papinchak, The Seattle Times
"We come to see that Baker has written, here as elsewhere, a book of associations...in which he celebrates the superfluous details of life....He is an expert craftsman...[The Anthologist] is a testament to -- indeed an anthology of -- moments when poetry and life touch against each other....[Baker's work] is a rare example of affectionate art, of brilliant writing that manages to collect and display the odds and ends of existence in a way that makes the reader like it and him."
-- Stephen Abell, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
Slate Magazine, October 19, 2009
...To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, click the arrow on the player below. You can also download the audio file here, or click here to subscribe to the Slate Audio Book Club ...
Slate Magazine, October 19, 2009
...To listen to the Slate Audio Book Club discussion of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, click the arrow on the player below. You can also download the audio file here, or click Get your 14-day free trial of Audio Book Club ...
TwinCities.com, October 7, 2009
...everyone in the family. It's all free. Among the award-winning authors ready to greet fans will be Nicholson Baker, author of a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, whose new novel is "The Anthologist"; Robert Olen Butler, the Pulitzer ...
Telegraph, September 28, 2009
...Tom Payne applauds The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker's novel about a poetry-obsessed narrator. If you liked Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, you'll love this. The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker You might have ...
Portland Press Herald, September 27, 2009
...Maine author Nicholson Baker will be signing copies of his new novel, 'The Anthologist,' which focuses on an aging poet selected to write an introduction to a new anthology of verse. WHEN: 7 ...
Chicago Sun-Times, September 13, 2009
...etry come alive through eccentric 'Anthologist' character This guy makes you want to reach for the poetry books. Honest to God! Or at least slouch toward the computer to call up some verse to see what ...
Seattle Times, September 7, 2009
...'The Anthologist by Nicholas Baker Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $25 In the brisk and entertaining 'The Anthologist,' Nicholson Baker tackles what might seem a daunting task. He writes a completely successful ...
STLtoday.com, September 5, 2009
...Paul Chowder, the narrator and protagonist of 'The Anthologist,' is in a stew. He is supposed to be writing an introduction to an anthology of rhymed poems, and he keeps not doing it. As the days and weeks of ...
New York Times, September 3, 2009
...Nicholson Baker?s new novel, ?The Anthologist? (which David Orr reviews in this Sunday?s Book Review), contains a funny little badminton scene ? the narrator tries to join his neighbors in a game, but his dog races back and forth under the ...
Washington Post, September 1, 2009
...THE ANTHOLOGIST By Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster. 243 pp. $25 Poet Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker's 'The Anthologist,' has a vision of himself on a ladder: Above him ...
Guardian Unlimited, August 28, 2009
...misquotations from Vachel Lindsay and petulant abuse of Ezra Pound,' Tom Deveson said in the Sunday Times, reviewing Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist. 'Baker's book is parasitic on the work of better writers. It makes more sense to abandon ...
Spectator, August 27, 2009
...On the face of it, Nicholson Baker?s books are a varied bunch. His fiction ranges from the ultra close-up observations of daily life in the early novels to the hard-core sex of Fermata and Vox ...
Glasgow Herald, August 24, 2009
...NICHOLSON BAKER: grew an Old Testament-length beard, the remains of which still clung to his chin, in his attempt to step into the skin of the hero of his latest novel ...
Blogcritics.org, August 21, 2009
...blog, I notice. The cover graphic shows only a ripe plum. I don't like the title, The Anthologist. Never read Baker's other books. Nice cover. I like the way the little book feels as I turn it over to find the plum cut open on the back ...
The Scotsman, August 15, 2009
...HELLO, this is Paul Chowder, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know' begins Nicholson Baker's anthologist, a 'once-in-a-while-published kind of poet' labouring over the introduction to a new poetry anthology. His girlfriend Roz ...
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