The Everlasting Story of Nory - by Nicholson Baker (Paperback)

About the Book

The supreme fabulist of the everyday follows the exciting dreams of a precocious heroine who wants to become a dentist, has nightmares about teeth, and thinks about God. Baker evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.

Book Synopsis

Our supreme fabulist of the ordinary now turns his attention on a 9-year-old American girl and produces a novel as enchantingly idiosyncratic as any he has written. Nory Winslow wants to be a dentist or a designer of pop-up books. She likes telling stories and inventing dolls. She has nightmares about teeth, which may explain her career choice. She is going to school in England, where she is mocked for her accent and her friendship with an unpopular girl, and she has made it through the year without crying.

Nicholson Baker follows Nory as she interacts with her parents and peers, thinks about God and death-watch beetles, and dreams of cows with pointed teeth. In this precocious child he gives us a heroine as canny and as whimsical as Lewis Carroll's Alice and evokes childhood in all its luminous weirdness.

Review Quotes

"Baker has created a world in which imagination still gets the better of its new roommate, reason. . . . [The Everlasting Story of Nory is] a map of the 9-year-old mind, drawn perfectly to scale." --Daily News

"Baker turn[s] his celebrated powers. . .on the strange inner life of an American girl. . . . Nory is as large as life and twice as
natural." --The New York Times Book Review

"Thoughtful and daft, sure-footed and tentative. . . . [The Everlasting Story of Nory is] pitch-perfect." --The Wall Street Journal

"Tender, insightful, and hilarious." --Harper's Bazaar

About the Author

Nicholson Baker has published five novels-The Mezzanine, Room Temperature, Vox, The Fermata, and The Everlasting Story of Nory-and two works of nonfiction, U and I and The Size of Thoughts. He lives with his wife and two children in Maine.