Nicholson Baker Nicholson Baker is the author of ten novels, including The Mezzanine, The Fermata, and A Box of Matches, and five works of nonfiction, including Human Smoke and Double Fold, which was a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Baker’s irrepressible, unforgettable poet protagonist Paul Chowder, who first appeared in the highly acclaimed The Anthologist, and returned in Baker’s Traveling Sprinkler is back in The Paul Chowder Chronicles (Blue Rider Press; $17.00), which combines the two novels into a single volume. Chowder’s enthusiasms for poetry and songwriting frame a love story about two people rediscovering each other. The novels are intimate, endearing, and filled with what Baker once called “the tiny inciting incidents” of life which, as he sees it, address the big question any novel is really trying to answer—Is life worth living? Alan Cheuse Countless listeners depend on the book reviews from Alan Cheuse, America's "voice of books" on NPR, and many of those listeners also follow his own critically acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. Cheuse is the author of five novels, four collections of short fiction, the memoir Fall Out of Heaven, and A Trance After Breakfast, a collection of travel essays. As a book commentator, Cheuse is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, The Idaho Review, and The Southern Review, among other places. He teaches in the Writing Program at George Mason University and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In An Authentic Captain Marvel Ring and Other Stories(Santa Fe Writer's Project; $15.00) his very best short stories and novellas are brought together in a quintessential collection.

• published: 09 Dec 2014
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