Reading List

Authors Like Nicholson Baker

Q: What should I read after The Mezzanine?

Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) and Life A User's Manual (1978), Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), which also covers a single day, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

Q: What books are like U and I?

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage (1997) is the closest: a writer circling an older writer, D. H. Lawrence, and mostly writing about himself. Read Updike's own Rabbit novels to see what Baker was measuring himself against.

Q: Does Nicholson Baker have a new book?

His most recent book is Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art (2024), about learning to draw and paint. No newer book had been announced when this list was reviewed in October 2026.

Q: Which Nicholson Baker book should I read first?

The Mezzanine (1988): it is short and contains everything he does. For nonfiction, start with Double Fold (2001), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Mezzanine (1988) covers one office worker's lunch hour. Howie eats popcorn, a hot dog and a cookie, buys a new pair of shoelaces and rides an escalator back up to his desk; much of the book happens in footnotes, some of them several pages long, about milk cartons, perforation and plastic straws. Thirteen years later Baker won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Double Fold (2001), his attack on libraries that microfilmed old newspapers and then threw the paper away. By then he had founded the American Newspaper Repository, in 1999, to save runs of the New York World and the Chicago Tribune that the British Library was auctioning off. The ten writers below share his conviction that the overlooked thing, looked at long enough, is the story.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Close attention · Digressive fiction · Essays · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches to Nicholson Baker are Georges Perec, who catalogued ordinary life down to the last object; Geoff Dyer, whose Out of Sheer Rage (1997) circles D. H. Lawrence the way U and I (1991) circles John Updike; and Laurence Sterne, who wrote the first great novel of digressions. Further down are the writers for Baker's other half: the library campaigner and the pacifist historian.

10 authors like Nicholson Baker

The first great digresser

Laurence Sterne

Anglo-Irish · Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Sterne was born in Clonmel, Ireland, in 1713 and was a Church of England clergyman in Yorkshire when the first volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman made him famous in 1759; the ninth and last appeared in 1767, the year before he died. The narrator sets out to tell his life story and is interrupted at every turn, with a black page, a marbled page and squiggly diagrams of his own plot. In 1798 the physician John Ferriar showed that Sterne had borrowed passages, some nearly word for word, from Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

This is where the method of The Mezzanine begins: a narrator who cannot get from one moment to the next because every object sends him somewhere else. Sterne uses blank and black pages where Baker uses footnotes, but the comedy and the tenderness are the same. It suits readers who want to see how old the digressive novel is.

— Lisanne

One ordinary day

Virginia Woolf

British · Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927)

Woolf (1882–1941) was a London novelist and essayist and, with her husband Leonard, co-founder of the Hogarth Press. Mrs Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway through a single June day in 1923 as she prepares for a party, moving in and out of the minds of the people she passes. In her essay “Modern Fiction” she asked novelists to examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.

The Mezzanine is a comic, office-bound cousin of Mrs Dalloway: a few hours, one consciousness, and the small things it touches on the way. Woolf follows feeling where Baker follows mechanisms, so she suits readers who like his attention but want more of the people in the room.

— Lisanne

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

The inventory of everything

Georges Perec

French · Life A User's Manual (1978), An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975)

Perec (1936–1982) was a member of the Oulipo, the Paris group of writers who worked under formal constraints; his novel A Void (1969) never uses the letter e. Life A User's Manual, which won the Prix Médicis, describes the rooms and residents of one Paris apartment block, object by object. For An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris he sat in Place Saint-Sulpice over three days in October 1974 and wrote down what happened there: buses, pigeons, passers-by.

Perec shares Baker's belief that nothing is too ordinary to describe, and his patience with lists, objects and the things nobody notices. He is more systematic and Baker more personal, but An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris could be a chapter of The Mezzanine moved to a café.

— Lisanne

The writer Baker wrote a book about

John Updike

American · Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Updike (1932–2009) wrote more than twenty novels, many short stories and a great deal of criticism, much of it for The New Yorker. The last two Rabbit novels each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is the subject of Baker's U and I (1991), in which Baker resolves to read no more Updike than he already has and quotes him from memory, often inaccurately.

Read Updike to see where Baker's precise, physical sentences came from, and then reread U and I to watch an admirer measure himself against them. Updike describes the surface of American life with the same care, though his subjects are marriage and desire rather than drinking straws.

— Lisanne

Every book by John Updike →

Detail without the filter

Karl Ove Knausgård

Norwegian · My Struggle (2009–2011, six volumes), The Morning Star (2020)

Knausgård was born in 1968 and grew up in southern Norway. My Struggle, about 3,600 pages in six volumes, records his own life in close detail, from his father's death to his marriage and young children; the English translations are by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. Some relatives objected publicly to how they were portrayed, and his father's family tried to block publication through legal action.

Knausgård does at length what Baker does in miniature: a cigarette, a cup of coffee or a nappy change described until it becomes strange. The difference is cost. Baker's attention is comic and mostly turned on objects; Knausgård's is turned on real people, which makes him the writer who most complicates the method.

— Lisanne

Every book by Karl Ove Knausgård →

A book about not writing a book

Geoff Dyer

British · But Beautiful (1991), Out of Sheer Rage (1997), Zona (2012)

Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958 and writes novels, essays and books that sit between genres. Out of Sheer Rage is subtitled In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence: it records his attempts to start a study of Lawrence while avoiding it at every turn. Zona retells Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker scene by scene, with digressions.

The obvious companion to U and I. Both books are about a younger writer and an older one, both are really about the younger writer's own nerves, and both are funnier than criticism usually is. Dyer is more restless and travels more; Baker stays at his desk.

— Lisanne

The very short story

Lydia Davis

American · Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Can't and Won't (2014)

Davis was born in 1947 and won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013. Her stories run from a single sentence to many pages, and many are about small irritations of daily life, including letters of complaint to companies. She has also translated Proust's Swann's Way (2003) and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (2010).

Davis and Baker share a fascination with how a mind snags on trivial things and cannot let go. Where Baker expands one lunch hour into a novel, Davis compresses the same kind of attention into a paragraph. Good for readers who love his sentences but want them shorter.

— Lisanne

In defence of librarians

Susan Orlean

American · The Orchid Thief (1998), The Library Book (2018)

Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. The Library Book investigates the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library and the case against Harry Peak, the man arrested for it, who was never tried; around that story she writes a history of the library and a portrait of the people who work there. The Orchid Thief was the basis of the film Adaptation (2002).

Read Orlean against Double Fold. Both books are about what libraries keep and lose, but Baker writes as a prosecutor of the profession and Orlean as its admirer. Together they give the whole argument, and she suits readers who want the librarians' side told with the same curiosity.

— Lisanne

Every book by Susan Orlean →

The pacifist historian

Howard Zinn

American · A People's History of the United States (1980), The Bomb (2010)

Zinn (1922–2010) flew as a bombardier with the US Army Air Forces in the Second World War and became a historian and activist, teaching at Spelman College and Boston University. A People's History of the United States tells American history from the point of view of workers, enslaved people and dissenters; many historians have criticised it as one-sided. The Bomb collects his essays on Hiroshima and on the bombing of Royan in France in April 1945, a raid he flew on.

Both Human Smoke and The Bomb question the received story of the Second World War and the bombing of cities. Baker builds his case from dated fragments of newspapers and diaries, Zinn from argument and his own memory. Readers who want the pacifist case should read them side by side.

— Lisanne

Every book by Howard Zinn →

Attention as resistance

Jenny Odell

American · How to Do Nothing (2019), Saving Time (2023)

Odell is an artist and writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy argues that stepping back from online life to notice birds, neighbourhoods and local places is a way of resisting technology built to hold our attention. Saving Time turns the same argument on clocks and productivity.

Odell gives a reason for what Baker simply does: looking slowly at things the economy has no use for. Her subject is attention itself rather than the objects, which makes her a good bridge between The Mezzanine and Finding a Likeness, his 2024 book about learning to draw and paint.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jenny Odell →

Where to start if you loved Nicholson Baker

If you loved The Mezzanine, read Georges Perec.

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris: three days of watching one square.

If you loved U and I, read Geoff Dyer.

Out of Sheer Rage: the same anxious devotion, turned on D. H. Lawrence.

If you loved Double Fold, read Susan Orlean.

The Library Book: the case for the people Baker argued with.

If you want to see where it all began, read Laurence Sterne.

Tristram Shandy, the original novel of digressions.

If you have not read Baker himself, start with The Mezzanine.

It is 144 pages long. Then U and I for the essays and Double Fold for the campaigns.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Nicholson Baker

Who writes like Nicholson Baker?

Georges Perec, Geoff Dyer and Laurence Sterne are the closest: Perec for the catalogue of ordinary objects, Dyer for books about failing to write books, and Sterne for the digressive novel itself. Lydia Davis and Virginia Woolf share his close attention to an ordinary mind.

What should I read after The Mezzanine?

Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) and Life A User's Manual (1978), Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), which also covers a single day, and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

What books are like U and I?

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage (1997) is the closest: a writer circling an older writer, D. H. Lawrence, and mostly writing about himself. Read Updike's own Rabbit novels to see what Baker was measuring himself against.

Is Nicholson Baker like Karl Ove Knausgård?

In method, partly: both describe ordinary actions in more detail than most novelists dare. Baker's detail is comic and mostly about objects; Knausgård's My Struggle is autobiographical and about real people, some of whom objected to how they were portrayed.

Does Nicholson Baker have a new book?

His most recent book is Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art (2024), about learning to draw and paint. No newer book had been announced when this list was reviewed in October 2026.

Which Nicholson Baker book should I read first?

The Mezzanine (1988): it is short and contains everything he does. For nonfiction, start with Double Fold (2001), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Sources

List last reviewed 30 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Nicholson Baker

10 authors like Nicholson Baker

Laurence Sterne

Virginia Woolf

Georges Perec

John Updike

Karl Ove Knausgård

Geoff Dyer

Lydia Davis

Susan Orlean

Howard Zinn

Jenny Odell

Where to start if you loved Nicholson Baker

Frequently asked questions about authors like Nicholson Baker

Who writes like Nicholson Baker?

What should I read after The Mezzanine?

What books are like U and I?

Is Nicholson Baker like Karl Ove Knausgård?

Does Nicholson Baker have a new book?

Which Nicholson Baker book should I read first?

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