The Mezzanine - Paperback

by Nicholson Baker (Author)

"A seriously funny book."--Salman Rushdie

"It pulverized me."--Hernan Diaz

An elegant new edition of Nicholson Baker's stunning and highly influential first novel, a witty and boundlessly inventive homage to the profound, neglected details of everyday working life

The Mezzanine is a novel told through one man's ride up an escalator in the office building where he works. In the hands of Nicholson Baker, the bestselling and award-winning author of Vox and The Anthologist, this journey is transformed into a stylistically dazzling reappraisal of the objects and rituals of our lives. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one's shoes, Baker at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. His sharp storytelling and existential humor bring clarity to the odd angles of the ordinary.

Since its first publication in 1988, this novel has become a perennial favorite of readers and writers looking to better understand our uncanny everyday, and has become a cult classic of modern literature. In less than 150 brilliant pages, The Mezzanine manages to wryly interrogate the logic of modernity, celebrate the strange reality of life in the 1980s, and express something of the profundity of human existence.

Front Jacket

Turns an ordinary ride up an office escalator into a meditation on our relations with familiar objects--shoelaces, straws, and more. Baker's debut novel, and a favorite amongst many of us here.

Author Biography

Nicholson Baker has written eighteen books, including Vox, The Anthologist, Human Smoke, and Baseless--also an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Herman Hesse Prize. Baker and his wife live on the Penobscot River in Maine.