Checkpoint

Praise

“A quick, stripped cry of a book. . . . As timely as fiction gets.” –Lorrie Moore, New York Review of Books

“Provocative . . . incendiary . . . a great work.” –Rick Moody, The Believer

“A meditation on action . . . [Baker] analyses the details of daily life with a surgeon’s precision.” –The Economist

“If one of our supreme chroniclers of mild manners can be roused to such patriotic indignation, democracy yet has a fighting chance.” –Voice Literary Supplement

“A ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama for the printed page, a timely and tense screed for a divided country hurtling toward who knows where.” –Associated Press

“Checkpoint is about limits–of presidential power, of law, of discourse, of rationality, and of language itself.” –Boston Phoenix

“Compelling . . . a passionate cry from the heart.” –USA Today

“What makes Baker original is his minute obsessiveness and his willingness to entertain inappropriate subjects. . . Checkpoint takes Baker’s obsessiveness and inappropriateness into the public realm.” –Newsweek

“An astonishing, uncomfortable conversation. Baker has a real ear for the cadence and wryness of the modern intelligentsia.” –Portland Oregonian

“Baker’s new novel checks its inhibitions at the door . . . entertaining, edgy and unpredictable.” –Las Vegas City Life

“Sly, slender but important . . . Baker excels at writing about those facets of the human experience we prefer to hide.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“This novel could be a kind of record of our times. . . . Its goal is to take [the] internal combustion process of hatred and anger and make it visible–which Baker does brilliantly.” –Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“On the whole, Baker improves upon Samuel Beckett’s [Godot]. Baker’s jokes will make people, rather than theatre majors, laugh.” –Los Angeles Times

“Checkpoint is like a hornet: It’s small, quiet, with a sinister aspect to its midday peregrinations, and it has a stinger: conscience.” –Toronto Globe and Mail

“I confess to finding Nicholson Baker’s prose so witty and hypnotic that I never want it to stop.” –Washington Post

“Baker writes like no one else in America.” –Newsweek

“Baker [is] one of our most gifted and original writers.” –Seattle Times

“Enthusiast, obsessive, visionary, engineer of the everyday–there’s nobody quite like Baker in the literary universe.” –Newsday

“[Baker’s] prose is so luminescent and so precise it manually recalibrates our brains.” –Time