An anthology is a collection of literary works chosen by the compiler. It may be a collection of poems, short stories, plays, songs, or excerpts. In genre fiction anthology is used to categorize collections of shorter works such as short stories and short novels, usually collected into a single volume for publication.

The word derives from the Greek word ἀνθολογία (anthologia; literally “flower-gathering”) for garland — or bouquet of flowers — which was the title of the earliest surviving anthology, assembled by Meleager of Gadara. Meleager's Garland became the seed that grew into the Greek Anthology. The term miscellany is also used, but was more common in the past. In medieval Europe the term florilegium, again meaning a collection of flowers, was used for an anthology of Latin proverbs and textual excerpts.

The complete collections of works are often called Complete Works or Opera Omnia (Latin language equivalent).

Media[link]

The term is also applied to radio or TV programs, movies, comic books and other such media featuring a variety of different stories. Examples of radio anthologies are Suspense and Escape. Examples of TV anthologies are Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Tales from the Darkside, Producers' Showcase, the Disney anthology television series, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Ford Star Jubilee, The Alcoa Hour, Playhouse 90, and Tales from the Crypt, which was not only an HBO series but also a movie anthology, both based on the EC horror-comic anthology. Other examples of anthology films are Four Rooms, Tales of Manhattan, Flesh and Fantasy, and The Cat o' Nine Tails.

Traditional[link]

In East Asian tradition, an anthology was a recognised form of compilation of a given poetic form. It was assumed that there was a cyclic development: any particular form, say the tanka in Japan, would be introduced at one point in history, be explored by masters during a subsequent time, and finally be subject to popularisation (and a certain dilution) when it achieved widespread recognition. In this model, which derives from Chinese tradition, the object of compiling an anthology was to preserve the best of a form, and cull the rest.

In Malaysia, an anthology (or antologi in Malay) is a collection of syair, sajak (or modern prose), proses, drama scripts, and pantuns. Notable anthologies that are used in secondary schools include Sehijau Warna Daun, Seuntai Kata Untuk Dirasa, Anak Bumi Tercinta, Anak Laut and Kerusi.

Twentieth century[link]

In the twentieth century, anthologies became an important part of poetry publishing for a number of reasons. For English poetry, the Georgian poetry series ^[1] was trend-setting; it showed the potential success of publishing an identifiable group of younger poets marked out as a 'generation'. It was followed by numerous collections from the 'stable' of some literary editor, or collated from a given publication, or labelled in some fashion as 'poems of the year'. Academic publishing also followed suit, with the success of the Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of English Verse^[2] encouraging other collections not limited to modern poetry. In fact the concept of 'modern verse' was fostered by the appearance of the phrase in titles such as the Faber & Faber anthology by Michael Roberts,^[3] and the very different William Butler Yeats Oxford Book of Modern Verse.^[4]

Since publishers generally found anthology publication a more flexible medium than the collection of a single poet's work, and indeed rang innumerable changes on the idea as a way of marketing poetry, publication in an anthology (in the right company) became at times a sought-after form of recognition for poets. The self-definition of movements, dating back at least to Ezra Pound's efforts on behalf of Imagism, could be linked on one front to the production of an anthology of the like-minded. Also, whilst not connected with poetry, publishers have produced collective works of fiction from a number of authors and used the term anthology to describe the collective nature of the text. These have been in a number of subjects, including Erotica as edited by Mitzi Szereto as well as American Gothic Tales edited by Joyce Carol Oates.

More recently, anthologies have appeared on the internet, making a collection of works easily accessible.

Omnibus[link]

A book comprising previously published, related works is often called an omnibus edition of those works, or simply an omnibus. Commonly two or more components have been previously published as books but a collection of shorter works, or shorter works collected with one previous book, may be an omnibus. One important class is works by one author.

• The Omnibus Jules Verne (4-Books-In-1: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, The Blockade Runners, From the Earth to the Moon and a Trip Around It). Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.^[5]

• The Sherlock Holmes illustrated omnibus : a facsimile ed. of all Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, illustrated by Sidney Paget, as they originally appeared in the Strand magazine. London: John Murray. 1978.^[6]

• Agatha Christie 1920s Omnibus, Agatha Christie 1930s Omnibus, and so on to the 1960s Omnibus, are five omnibus editions of those novels by Agatha Christie that were originally published in one decade.^[7]

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• Primer
• Diwan

• Categories: Comics anthologies, Compilation albums, Essay collections, Fiction anthologies, Anthology films, Manga anthologies, Poetry anthologies, Anthology television series and Anthology book stubs

References[link]

Nicholson Baker in December 2007.

Nicholson Baker (born January 7, 1957) is a contemporary American writer of fiction and non-fiction. As a novelist, he often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness, and has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth and sex. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization.

Life[link]

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957 in New York City, and spent much of his youth in the Rochester, New York, area. He studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College. He lives today with his wife and two children in South Berwick, Maine. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.

Baker has been a fervent critic of what he perceives as libraries' unnecessary destruction of paper-based media. He wrote several vehement articles in The New Yorker critical of the San Francisco Public Library for sending thousands of books to a landfill, the elimination of card catalogs, and the destruction of old books and newspapers in favor of microfilm. In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts.

In 1999, Baker established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries.^[1] In 2001 he published Double Fold, in which he accuses certain librarians of lying about the decay of materials and being obsessed with technological fads, at the expense of both the public and historical preservation.

Baker describes himself as having "always had pacifist leanings."^[2]

In March 2008, Baker reviewed John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the New York Review of Books. In the review, Baker described Wikipedia's beginnings, its culture, and his own editing activities under the username "Wageless".^[3] His article, How I fell in love with Wikipedia, was published in The Guardian newspaper in the UK on April 10, 2008.^[4]

Books by Nicholson Baker[link]

• The Mezzanine (1988)
• Room Temperature (1990)
• U and I: A True Story (1991) is a non-fiction study of how a reader engages with an author's work: partly an appreciation of John Updike, and partly a kind of self-exploration. Rather than giving a traditional literary analysis, Baker begins the book by stating that he will read no more Updike than he already has up to that point. All of the Updike quotations used are presented as coming from memory alone, and many are inaccurate, with correct versions and Baker's (later) commentary on the inaccuracy given in brackets.
• Vox (1992) consists of an episode of phone sex between two young single people on a pay-per-minute chat line. The sex scenes in the novel, though quite vivid, nevertheless share the basic approach that Baker has taken since The Mezzanine: in this case, he explores two characters' accumulated thoughts and memories in relation to sex. For some readers, Baker's obsession with detail detracted from a hoped-for pornographic effect. Others, in reading the imaginative sex stories the two protagonists produce for one another, have perceived a budding romantic affection: in the last act they perform before hanging up, the man gives the woman his phone number. The book was Baker's first New York Times bestseller. Monica Lewinsky supposedly once gave a copy to President Bill Clinton.
• The Fermata (1994) also addresses erotic life and fantasy. To quote the dust jacket of one edition: "Arno Strine likes to stop time and take women's clothes off. He is hard at work on his autobiography, 'The Fermata.' It proves in the telling to be a very provocative, funny, and altogether morally confused piece of work." (A fermata is a mark in musical notation indicating a note should be sustained.)
• The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) was inspired by Baker's daughter Alice, "the informant", to whom he dedicates the book. In this work, Baker tries to see the world through the eyes of a curious nine-year-old American girl attending school in England.
• Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001) is a non-fiction book about preservation, newspapers, and the American library system. An excerpt first appeared in the July 24, 2000, issue of The New Yorker, under the title "Deadline: The Author's Desperate Bid to Save America's Past." The exhaustively researched work (there are 63 pages of endnotes and 18 pages of references in the paperback edition) details Baker's quest to uncover the fate of thousands of books and newspapers that were replaced and often destroyed during the microfilming boom of the 1980s and 1990s.
• A Box of Matches (2003) is in many ways a continuation of Room Temperature, similarly mining the narrator's store of reflections and memories, many of them domestic. The narrator is now middle-aged and has a family. He rises each morning about 4:00, lights a fire in the fireplace, and ponders. The work is admired, although some have found it rather less exuberant than its predecessor.
• Checkpoint (2004) is composed of dialogue between two old high school friends, Jay and Ben, who discuss Jay's plans to assassinate President George W. Bush. Jay is an unbalanced day laborer who, in the depths of his anger and desperation at Bush's actions and his inability to do anything to stop them, has traveled to Washington, D.C., to kill the president. He considers many far-fetched means of assassination, such as depleted uranium boulders, flying radio-controlled CD saws, homing bullets trained to target the victim by being "marinated" in a tin with a picture of the president, and hypnotized Manchurian scorpions. Ben has met Jay in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, unaware that his friend is planning to commit "a major, major, major crime." Over the course of the novella, Ben discusses what drove Jay to plot an assassination. Reviewers have pointed out that the book is mild, and the planned violence so cartoonish as to be non-threatening.
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008) is a history of World War II that questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid the war at all costs but were forced into action by Hitler's unforgiving crusade. It consists largely of official government transcripts and other documents from the time. In form it is similar to Sven Lindqvist's "A History of Bombing" (New York: New Press, 2001), which Baker includes in the book's copious list of references. Baker cites documents that suggest that the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom were provoking Germany into war (showing, for example, that Britain bombed Germany before Germany bombed Britain) and that the leaders of those two nations had ulterior motives for wanting to participate. In the epilogue to the book he suggests that the pacifists (who are often vilified by WWII historians) had it right all along, stating: “They failed, but they were right.” ^[5][6] Some reviewers were dismissive of Human Smoke, the historian Noel Malcolm describing it as a "strangely childish book"^[7] and William Grimes as a "self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book".^[8] Author Christopher Hitchens accused Baker of ahistoricism and wrote that the book served as a reminder of how "fatuous the pacifist position can sound, or indeed can be".^[9] Conservative political commentator R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. awarded his J. Gordon Coogler Award for Worst Book of 2008 to Human Smoke.^[10] Other reviewers praised Baker's use of documentary research and the intricate construction of the text. Colm Toibin wrote in his New York Times review that "the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used to dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism,"^[11] and Mark Kurlansky wrote for the Los Angeles Times that "People are going to get really angry at Baker for criticizing their favorite war. But he hasn't fashioned his tale from gossip. It is documented, with copious notes and attributions. The grace of these well-ordered snapshots is that there is no diatribe; you are left to put things together yourself. [Human Smoke] may be one of the most important books you will ever read."^[12]
• The Anthologist (2009) is narrated by Paul Chowder, a little-known poet, who is attempting to write an introduction to a poetry anthology. Distracted by problems in his life—Chowder's career is going nowhere, and his girlfriend has recently left him—he is unable to begin writing, and instead ruminates on poets and poetry throughout history.
• House of Holes (2011) is a collection of novellas, more or less linked or knotted to each other. The novellas are erotic in the sense of Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron. Either topics are closed resorts in natural areas for wealthy clients on the run from life-threatening epidemics generated by sexual contact. Other relatives like Alice are waving at the entrance of Holes House, offering such artistic entering techniques as tumbling through a clothes dryer and self-sucking through a soft drink straw.^[13] It is a book of romantic fairy tales called by the author himself ”A book of Raunch”.

Books[link]

Novels[link]

• The Mezzanine (1988, Weidenfeld & Nicolson; ISBN 1-55584-258-5 / 1990, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-72576-8)
• Room Temperature (1990, Grove Weidenfeld; ISBN 0-8021-1224-2 / 1990, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73440-6 / 1990, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014212-6 / 1991, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014021-2)
• Vox: A Novel (1992, Random House; ISBN 0-394-58995-5 / 1992, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-74211-5 / 1992, Granta; ISBN 0-14-014057-3)
• The Fermata (1994, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-75933-6)
• The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998, Random House; ISBN 0-679-43933-1 / 1998, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73440-6)
• A Box of Matches (2003, Random House; ISBN 0-375-50287-4 / 2003, Chatto & Windus; ISBN 0-7011-7402-1)
• Checkpoint (2004, Random House; ISBN 1-4000-4400-6)
• The Anthologist (2009, Simon & Schuster; ISBN 1-84737-635-5)
• House of Holes, A Book of Raunch (2011, Simon & Schuster; ISBN 1-4391-8951-X

Non-fiction[link]

• U and I: A True Story (1991, Random House; ISBN 0-394-58994-7 / 1991 Penguin/Granta; ISBN 0-14-014226-6 (hard) / 1992, Penguin/Granta; ISBN 0-14-014040-9 (paper) /1995, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-73575-5 / 1998, Granta; ISBN 1-86207-097-0)
• The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (1996, Random House, ISBN 0-679-43932-3 / 1996, Vintage; ISBN 0-679-77624-9 (paper) / 1996, Chatto & Windus; ISBN 0-7011-6301-1 (hard) / 1997, Vintage; ISBN 0-09-957971-5 (paper)
• Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001, Random House; ISBN 0-375-50444-3 / 2001, Vintage; ISBN 0-375-72621-7 / 2002, Vintage; ISBN 0-09-942903-9)
• With Margaret Brentano (his wife). The World on Sunday|The World on Sunday: Graphic Art in Joseph Pulitzer's Newspaper (1898– 1911) (2005, Bulfinch; ISBN 0-8212-6193-2)
• Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (2008, Simon & Schuster; ISBN 978-1-4165-6784-4)

Further reading[link]

• Cox, Richard J. Vandals in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholson Baker's Assault on Libraries. Greenwood Press, 2002. ISBN 0-313-32344-5
• Fabre, Claire. "Aux frontières de l’intime : l’intériorité exhibée dans Room Temperature (1984) de Nicholson Baker." Revue française d’études américaines. 2006. 113-121.
• Richardson, Eve, "Space, Projection and the Banal in the Works of Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Nicholson Baker", in Emma Gilby et Katja Haustein (ed.), Space. New Dimensions in French Studies, Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Francfurt, New York and Vienna, Peter Lang, 2005. ("Modern French Identities", 30)
• Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Nicholson Baker. University of South Carolina Press, 1999. ISBN 1-57003-303-X
• Star, Alexander. "The Paper Pusher." The New Republic. May 28, 2001. 38-41.

References[link]

1. ^ American Newspaper Repository
2. ^ McGrath, Charles (2008-03-04) A Debunker on the Road to World War II, New York Times
3. ^ Baker, Nicholson;"The Charms of Wikipedia", The New York Review of Books; Volume 55, Number 4 March 20, 2008.
4. ^ How I fell in love with Wikipedia
5. ^ Toibin, Colm (March 23, 2008). "Their Vilest Hour". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Toibin-t.html?ref=arts. Retrieved May 20, 2010. 
6. ^ 'Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization' by Nicholson Baker - BOOK REVIEW - Los Angeles Times
7. ^ Review, Daily Telegraph, 2 May2008
8. ^ Review, New York Times, 12 March 2008
9. ^ Review, New Statesman, 15 May 2008
10. ^ Tyrell, R. Emmett, Jr., "J. Gordon Coogler Award for 2008," American Spectator; Volume 42, Number 2, March 2009
11. ^ Toibin, Colm (March 23, 2008). "Their Vilest Hour". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Toibin-t.html?ref=arts. Retrieved May 20, 2010. 
12. ^ Review, "Days of infamy 'Smoke' and mirrors," Los Angeles Times March 9, 2008.
13. ^ Elaine Blair (September 29, 2011 • Volume 58, Number 14). "Coming Attractions". Review on "House of Holes". The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/sep/29/coming-attractions/. Retrieved September 13, 2011. 

External links[link]

• Nicholson Baker. Faculty profile at European Graduate School, biography, bibliography, photos and video lectures
• Nicholson Baker at Random House, author page
• Nicholson Baker, "A Debunker on the Road to World War II". New York Times, March 4, 2008
• Cox, Richard J. "The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the Digital Age"
• Grimes, William. ""Say What? It Wasn’t a Just War After All?" New York Times Book Review
• "How I fell in love with Wikipedia". Guardian. April 10, 2008
• "The Charms of Wikipedia" New York Review of Books, volume 55, number 4, March 20, 2008.
• Interview about "Human Smoke" on "BackStory" radio program
• "Can the Kindle really improve on the book?" New Yorker, August 3, 2009. On the Kindle reading device.
• A radio interview with Nicholson Baker Aired on the Lewis Burke Frumkes Radio Show.
• Wroe, Nicholas. "A Life in Writing". Guardian, 19 September 2009. An interview.
• KCRW Bookworm Interview May 4, 2002