Vox is a 1992 novel by Nicholson Baker. Unusually for a literary novel, Vox enjoyed several weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.[1]
On the release of Vox, Publishers Weekly declared it was "unaccountably self-indulgent" and that "Baker's inestimable gift, evinced in the other books, for describing the indescribable with absolutely spot-on flourishes are nowhere to be found in Vox."[2] For The Village Voice, it "simply ushers us into the back pages of a glossy magazine", whereas The New York Times Book Review found it "a compelling and irresistible take, a tour-de-force illustration of the fantasy inherent in eroticism."[3] For James Kaplan, writing in Vanity Fair, "the book achieves between its two geographically distanced protagonists the kind of intimacy that all of us, from Bible-thumpers to leather fanciers yearn for. Vox is that rarest of rarities: a warm turn on".[4]
Writing in The New York Times in 2011, Charles McGrath declared Vox to be a "phone-sex novel so steamy that Monica Lewinsky gave it as a gift to Bill Clinton."[5] Baker's editor in the 1990s, David Rosenthal commented that "when Vox came in, I thought it was both hilarious and horny [...] I kept thinking, 'Where on earth did this come from?'"[5]
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Novels |
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Non-fiction |
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