U and I: A True Story

by Nicholson Baker

Overview

Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307807502
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/24/2011
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Nicholson Baker is the author of ten novels and numerous works of nonfiction, including The Anthologist, The Mezzanine, and Human Smoke. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hermann Hesse Prize, and a Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Maine with his wife, Margaret Brentano; both his children went to Maine public schools.

Date of Birth:

1954

Place of Birth:

Rochester, NY

Education:

B.A. in English, Haverford College, 1980

Editorial Reviews

Baker ponders novelist John Updike in this alternately self-deprecating and self-aggrandizing essay. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this extended essay on the anxiety of influence, Baker ( The Mezzanine , LJ 11/1/88; Room Temperature , LJ 3/15/90, one of LJ' s ``Best Books of 1990'') explores his intellectual and emotional debt to John Updike. His obsession with Updike most closely resembles Frederick Exley's Edmund Wilson fixation in Pages from a Cold Island ( LJ 5/15/75), a parallel that occurs to Baker himself and troubles him briefly. Baker's essay, however, is more narrowly focused, more concerned with wordsmithing and literary craft. It is a highly subjective, even self-indulgent work that reveals little about Updike but overmuch about Baker. Nevertheless, the writing is clever and some of the ideas presented are engaging. The audience will be limited, most likely, to those with professional literary interests.-- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Library Journal