The reading, which is free and open to the public, takes place in Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, Room 201. A book signing will follow the reading, and copies of Baker's works will be available for purchase.

Nicholson Baker

"Nicholson Baker is as original and brilliantly playful in his choice of subject matter as in his prose style -- in both his fiction and his nonfiction," said Marshall Klimasewiski, assistant professor of English in Arts & Sciences. "I simply don't know of anybody anything like him. He writes with a beautiful, startling precision, but what he's precise about is so minute, mundane and unexpected -- so overlooked by literature yet so essential to the way that at least some of us live these days -- that his work and his agenda seem oddly daring, almost politically charged.

"Plus, of course, he's very funny, and a great, simple pleasure to read, one sentence to the next."

Baker is the author of five novels -- The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994) and The Everlasting Story of Nory (1998) -- as well as three works of nonfiction, U and I: A True Story (1991), The Size of Thoughts (1996) and Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (2001). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, American Libraries, "Best American Short Stories" and "Best American Essays."

Reading Who: Fiction writer Nicholson Baker Where: Hurst Lounge, Duncker Hall, Room 201 When: 8 p.m. April 4 Tickets: Free and open to the public Sponsors: The Writing Program Reading Series

Baker is on the editorial board of The American Scholar magazine and in 1997 received the Madison Freedom of Information Award from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for his work on behalf of the San Francisco Public Library.

In 1999, he founded the American Newspaper Repository (www.oldpapers.org), a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to preserving original 19th- and 20-century newspapers.

Born in 1957, Baker attended The Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York and Haverford College in Haverford, Pa. He lives in Maine with his wife and two children.