The Everlasting Story of Nory
Nicholson Baker
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0679763759
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
The Black Death: A Personal History
Brick wall, so you couldn’t see through it. There was a very tall brick wall around the garden of the Bishop’s Palace at Threll, with pointy stones on top, so that the poor people couldn’t sneak in at night and steal the cauliflowers, which might have looked tempting in the moonlight to a very hungry mouthwatering person of long ago. At Waitrose, the supermarket, they sold darling little dwarf cauliflowers in the ‘Dwarf Food’ section. It wouldn’t be called dwarf food in America because that would.
Littleguy how to play field hockey, after having spent some of her morning on Astroturf learning the basics. He hurt her feelings when he rejected a hockey stick she especially made for him out of a wooden pole, a toilet-paper tube taped on at an angle, and some green ribbon from her Samantha doll as decoration spiraled around. She had been rather pleased with this homemade stick. ‘Littleguy—so do you like it or do you hate it?’ she asked him, wanting to jostle him into saying a little.
Street with her brother, who was eight, coming back from the market with all the goods. She put her brother down, and she, being a thirteen-year-old, went off to do some homework, or prep. Her mother was making dinner, and went off in another room to get her laundry, and her father stayed in the breakfast room, unable to walk still, because of his injury about a month ago. She walked happily through the living room as she went to her room. There was her brother, taking out the matches slowly one.
And laughed a lot and drew madly on my fingernail.’ But Mr. Stone, the I.T. teacher, never said shutup. Nory one time called the little rectangle that was in the middle of the screen the Bermuda Rectangle, because inside it were five little green blobs that were islands and on one of the five islands was the little landing strip—and Mr. Stone liked that name for it and started calling it that, too, which made Nory feel proud. If you can imagine trying to land a huge airplane on a popsicle stick,.
Was a whole separate part of the Cathedral called the Lady Chapel that was dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but it had only a tiny bit of stained glass in it. That’s why they talked about it in R.S.—what kinds of decoration would you want in a Lady Chapel? You could have the seasons of the year or other important nuns and lady saints, or do scenes from Mary’s life. Long ago it had been painted rich colors, but right now the Lady Chapel definitely had problems, in Nory’s opinion. It smelled very.