Vox

by Nicholson Baker

Overview

Baker has written a novel that remaps the territory of sex—solitary and telephonic, lyrical and profane, comfortable and dangerous. Written in the form of a phone conversation between two strangers, Vox is an erotic classic that places the author in the first rank of America's major writers. Reading tour.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307807489
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/24/2011
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	259,657
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

NICHOLSON BAKER was born in 1957 and attended the Eastman School of Music and Haverford College. He has published ten novels and has written about poetry, literature, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. In 1999, he founded the American Newspaper Repository, a collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century newspapers. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper and the International Hermann Hesse Prize (Germany) in 2014. He lives in Maine with his wife and two children.

Date of Birth:

1954

Place of Birth:

Rochester, NY

Education:

B.A. in English, Haverford College, 1980

Editorial Reviews

Baker's self-indulgent novel, a 14-week PW bestseller in cloth, transcribes a long telephone conversation between two people who meet over a phone-sex call-in line. Author tour. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Jim and Abby meet over the phone when they both dial one of those 976 party lines that are advertised in adult magazines. After some exploratory small talk, they retire to the electronic ``back room'' for a more intimate chat. Their long conversation makes up the entire book. If the premise sounds a bit thin, remember that Nicholson Baker's brilliant first novel The Mezzanine ( LJ 11/1/88) was about an office worker's lunch-hour expedition to buy new shoelaces. Like all great artists, Baker has the ability to make familiar objects and everyday events seem new and strange. Centerfolds, lingerie catalogs, and X-rated videos will never look the same. Indeed, Vox transforms the genre itself: this is eroticism for the safe-sex Nineties. Not only is there no physical contact, the participants never leave the privacy of their own homes. Recommended, with the caveat that some readers may find the subject matter offensive. Baker's Room Temperature ( LJ 3/15/90) was one of LJ 's ``Best Books of 1990'' ( LJ 1/91).--Ed.-- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal

This is Ravel's "Bolero" played out on the page…The conversation gets sexier and sexier and…well, I'm too rang out to go on.
—Cosmopolitan

Louise Bernikow

A remarkable tour de force...Vox is hilarious...a delightful novel.
—The Washington Post Book World

Alexander Theroux

Imagine Chagall being commissioned to do the drawings for the joy of sex, and you'll have some notion of the topsy-turvey, concupiscent free-for-all that Vox conjures up....The book exudes a giddy buoyancy that you don't often find in American fiction.
—The San Francisco Chronicle

Michael Upchurch

Explicit, often funny, and above all erotic...Baker specializes in the risky and playful.
—The Los Angeles Times

Cyra McFadden