Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist

Paul Chowder is stuck. He’s a mid-level poet. His girlfriend, Roz, has left him. He has a penchant for distraction and a deep mistrust of iambic pentameter, and he just can’t get his flitting mind to settle down to write the introduction to a new anthology of ryhming verse.

Paul Chowder is the hapless but beguiling narrator of The Anthologist, the new novel by Nicholson Baker. Baker has written about phone sex, presidential asassination and John Updike, with almost obsessive minuteness. Human Smoke, a non-fiction book published last year, was controversial for implicating FDR and Churchill in the devastating death toll of World War II. Now, he turns his eye to the meter and rhyme and guts of poetry, and comes away with a sharply funny satire of literary grandiosity.

We're pleased to have Nicholson Baker here with us in the studio to discuss language, langour and what lingers in the mind of The Anthologist.

You can also see Nicholson Baker read from his new work at Gibson's Books in Concord today at 1 pm, and at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth at 7 pm tonight.