Rerun: #412 Nicholson Baker (Sep 2020)
Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for\xa0The New Yorker, Harper\u2019s,\xa0and many other publications. His latest book is\xa0Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.\n"In the end, I don\u2019t care how famous you get, how widely read you are during your lifetime. You\u2019re going to be forgotten. And you\u2019re going to have five or six fans in the end. It\u2019s going to be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are going to say,\xa0Oh, yeah, he was big.\xa0\u2026 So I think the key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you\u2019re only doing this for yourself. \u2026 So maybe do your best stuff for yourself and for the three, four, five people who know in the coming century that you ever existed. That\u2019s all you need to do."\nShow notes:\n\n@nicholsonbaker8\n\nnicholsonbaker.com\n\n\nThe Mezzanine\xa0(Grove Press \u2022 1988)\n\n\nBaseless\xa0(Penguin Press \u2022 2020)\n\n10:00\xa0Human Smoke\xa0(Simon & Schuster \u2022 2009)\n\n10:00\xa0"Wrong Answer"\xa0(Harper's \u2022 Sept 2013)\n\n11:00\xa0Room Temperature\xa0(Grove Press \u2022 2010)\n\n11:00\xa0U and I\xa0(Random House \u2022 2000)\n\n11:00\xa0Vox\xa0(Publisher \u2022 2000)\n\n11:00\xa0The Fermata\xa0(Author if different from Writer \u2022 Publisher \u2022 2000)\n\n12:00\xa0"The Projector"\xa0(New Yorker \u2022 Mar 1994)\n\n12:00\xa0The Size of Thoughts\xa0(Vintage Contemporaries \u2022 1996)\n\n13:00\xa0"The Author vs. the Library"\xa0(New Yorker \u2022 Oct 1996)\n\n19:00\xa0Double Fold\xa0(Vintage \u2022 2002)\n\n30:00\xa0Lab 257\xa0(Michael Carroll \u2022 Willam Morrow Paperbacks \u2022 2005)\n\n33:00\xa0Longform Podcast #192: Seymour Hersh\n\n\n33:00\xa0The Killing of Osama Bin Laden\xa0(Seymour Hersh \u2022 Verso \u2022 2017)\n\n33:00\xa0Longform Podcast #321: Nicholas Schmidle\n\n\n33:00\xa0"Getting Bin Laden"\xa0(Nicholas Schmidle \u2022 New Yorker \u2022 Aug 2011)\n\n46:00\xa0Baker's\xa0New Yorker\xa0archive\n\n\n\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices