Peter C. Baker
@apcbapcb
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Novel, PLANES, out now. Also magazine writing. essays on songs by me + pals: updates:
Joined June 2016
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Just about 11 years after I started writing it, PLANES is out today!
According to the New York Times it "captures our shared human ache with stunning accuracy." 🫠
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Delaney's writerly approach to grief will be a profound gift to many. On a less consequential note, he made it possible for me to get "sucking the NHS's dick" into a classy magazine
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The Plan? Get 542 literature PhDs to subscribe to Business Insider
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I've been reading my son "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day" a lot lately. It's 50 years old and still so weird / special / good. Tough feelings! No clearly formulated lessons! Unreliable narration! Wrote about it for
@NewYorker
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watching some of GIRLS season 1. if this came out today there would be parades celebrating how good it is. we didn't know how good we had it.
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A vital, luminous tweet from an important young voice ...
a lot of being a writer appears to be pretending to like — which is to say love — other people’s bad writing in hopes that they’ll return the favor
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I mean, I know it's not paid, per se, Tom. I am, uh, aware of the deficiency in the compensation department. But, I mean, it's Harper's Magazine. Like, I could potentially meet Claire Messud, I think.
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Rob Delaney--bard of the absurd, lover of the lewd, American champion of the British NHS--is publishing a book about losing a son, and I wrote about it for the
@NewYorker
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I wrote about Nicole Flattery's brilliant novel NOTHING SPECIAL. It's a study of Warhol, escape hatches that become traps, self-delusion, and--sneakily, movingly--human goodness, not as a solution to anything but still meaningful.
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I reviewed--and raved about, and quibbled with--Kerry Howley's stupendously sui generis BOTTOMS UP AND THE DEVIL LAUGHS, a stylish meditation on surveillance, selfhood, and the post-9/11 psychocultural mood board.
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For the
@NewYorker
, I reviewed Jessica Au's 'Cold Enough for Snow,' winner of the new Novel Prize. It's a short, sly book that sees our reflexive hunger for backstory––and pointedly refuses to satisfy it.
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This summer I published my first novel. I haven't done anything like 'read the whole thing' for over a year, and it often feels strangely distant. But in some recent book club meetings, talking about the book with engaged strangers, I've felt ... proud of it!
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US pedestrian deaths are way up from a decade ago.
@schmangee
wrote the first-ever book on the subject, and I reviewed it for
@nybooks
, taking the opportunity to think aloud about how Covid has (and hasn't) changed our streets.
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The 60-plus episodes of "The Tweedy Show" ––
@Sammytweedy
,
@spencertweedy
,
@JeffTweedy
, and company streaming live from home –– have brought me a lot of quarantine solace. Pleasure to write a short piece about their deep sweetness:
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finally getting to this stunner thanks to a nudge from an old
@adam_tooze
newsletter. though it's centrally about political economy, right off the bat it strikes me also as something worth any fiction writer's time. wonder if anyone has written about it from that angle.
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For this week's Screenland column, I zoomed in on one fascinating feature of the "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" movie: the ways you can feel the movie trying to look back on itself from a future it knows it doesn't have access to. (1/)
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Kenzaburo Oe's Paris Review interview is my favorite thing the magazine ever published: an amazing artifact of living and thinking and writing. RIP.
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at this point someone could tweet 'wow the new National song is about reading the LRB while eating a tagine alone at cafe Mogador' and I'd believe it
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For the
@NewYorker
, I wrote about getting duped by the publishing world's 'manuscript scammer,' aka the Spine Collector; about the commonalities between scamming and writing; and about the collective fiction of literary life.
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11 months since I wrote about the tweedy fam livestream. It's still going! Tonight: episode 180, with two
@wilco
members in-house. Live now IG
@stuffinourhouse
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as a sometimes editor-for-hire, more and more GPT-generated writing is coming across my desk. it's horrible -- and harder than baseline to edit. the badness is layered, weedy, tangled....
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You, blind to reality: "there's no real diversity of opinion on the literary left!"
Me, paying attention: the LRB recently ran a long psycho-cultural excavation of EastEnders AND a piece criticizing such endeavours.
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the sound of a dozen editors on New York and London typing into Slack: "should we commission KOK on vaping??????'
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watching Sex and the City season 1. absolutely positive that if it came out in today's TV landscape it would be instantly inducted into the Criterion Collection.
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I wrote a novel about life in the long shadows of post-9/11 rendition and torture. It's called PLANES, it's set in Rome and North Carolina, and it comes out in May.
For now, there's this long excerpt in the new issue of
@the_point_mag
. 🧵1/
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I'm liking the sound of 'Editor-at-Large.' Yeah, I'm liking that a lot. And on the masthead it goes above the assistants and associates. That feels right to me.
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Deal Report: From international literature sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, a 1,200-page account of the second half of the game we're watching right now, with digressions on liberal democracy, marriage, and American football, in a smashing deal, to FSG.
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Jameson: History hurts.
Wittgenstein: You learned the concept 'pain' when you learned language.
Physical therapist: 🤔yr walkin wrong bud
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RT if you want
@ChicagoMag
to commission me to write the story of the growing
@ghareebnawazCHI
empire
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From his letters with Arabella Kurtz
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San Fran people: as of this morning there are a dozen-ish signed copies of PLANES at
@CityLightsBooks
First visited the store 12 years ago, during the summer I started getting serious about writing fiction. Very cool to see--on my birthday!--my own novel hanging out there. 🎂
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having to do My Spiel ('though my name is Peter Baker and my writing is occasionally in the New York Times, I am not Peter Baker of the New York Times') slightly more than usual lately
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I wrote for the NYT Magazine about:
- NASCAR coming to the streets of Chicago
- the dream––fed by car commercials, movies, and video games––of the open urban road
- the pandemic's scrambling/unleashing of the American automotive id
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PLANES has a paperback cover! By the amazing Linda Huang (who also did the hardcover). Out summer.
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I have some spare handsome hardcovers of my novel. If you like or RT this or DM me before Sunday night, I'll throw your name in an electronic hat and pick two people to get a copy in the mail.
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photo proof that the new Lincoln Park Ghareeb will have the 99cent egg paratha breakfast, probably the best food deal in America
"You're tweeting at that restaurant aren't you?" - girlfriend
Wish you were open
@ghareebnawazCHI
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@BigMeanInternet
wonder if she has read Ministry for the Future (a not-insignificant source, I think, for climate beliefs -- including this one)
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My dad, I mean ... God. He could get a piece just brimming with TKs, on a Tuesday night. And by morning those TKs would be ... gone. Just: gone. Magic. He made pieces happen. He made all of us happen. And now he's crossed off the biggest TK of all. I miss you, Dad.
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tickled to see my book in pretty classy company in the
@xlorentzen
section of the
@yoloethics
gift guide
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After a decade of freelancing--writing features, essays, and reviews (
@NewYorker
,
@nytmag
,
@nybooks
,
@gdnlongread
), publishing a novel (
@AAKnopf
), and writing/editing for nonprofits--I'm looking for a full-time writing/editing job. (1/2)
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Fantastic
@LucyJakub
essay on work in -- and the many labors that go into -- Miyazaki movies.
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tweeting my
@nybooks
review of
@schmangee
's book about the pedestrian death crisis one more time -- for people who like reading best when they're supposed to be working.
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Only
@thedrift_mag
would run my theory that Klara and the Sun is not the story of the events it describes directly but rather the story of a broken robot generating a story from disintegrating fragments of its own experience. Fortunately the mag has other virtues too: subscribe !
My NYT Sunday Styles cover story about the rise of a little magazine called The Drift. A tale of grand New York intellectual tradition, tote bags and Tevas, argument and belletrism. Feat. Susan Sontag, Partisan Review, David Remnick and Eugene V. Debs📚🍸🙏
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And now my novel PLANES is out in paperback! I'm a big paperback guy myself, so I'm very excited. Easier than ever to buy for yourself, for a friend, for your bookclub ...
Just about 11 years after I started writing it, PLANES is out today!
According to the New York Times it "captures our shared human ache with stunning accuracy." 🫠
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Me, calling teen me via timephone: I reviewed an oral history of 2000s emo!
Teen: Isn't emo ... embarrassing?
Me: 'Looking back on my younger self’s embarrassment over emo’s too-muchness, I see that what really embarrassed me was myself.'
Teen: 🙎
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George Saunders story narrated by a Trader Joe's paneer tikka masala recalling five years spent in a Samsung smart fridge
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peace to Mike Davis. below: from when I interviewed him right after covid blew up in America.
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wildly accomplished and alive. one of the greatest reading experiences of my life. I feel changed by it.
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I complain a lot about Extinction Rebellion's strategy and analysis--but this is great 👍
BREAKING
@XRebellionUK
activists have blocked all major entrances to
#Farnborough
Airport
Protestors are calling on the world's super-rich elite and governments to ditch private flights.
#Farnborough
caters to the 1%. Private flyers cause half of aviation’s global emissions.
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PLANES "reads like vintage DeLillo," says
@borrelli
in the Chicago Tribune summer books preview. 🥴
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Got my account unlocked to share that I wrote about Nicholson Baker's latest--and its relationship to the rest of his work--for
@nybooks
. It's a defiantly odd book: about biological warfare, classification and secrecy, and everyday life, all at once.
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For those sane enough to spend Sunday off Twitter: I wrote about loving Belle and Sebastian across multiple eras of their existence (and my own).
Belle and Sebastian’s new album is full of references to aging, parenting, and nostalgia for youth, but also to some new orientation to life, one that takes its finitude a touch more seriously.
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Elaine Blair rangy and excellent on Hemingway, his reception and influence, and the weird and varied writer hidden by our cliched shorthand takes.
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in a just world MP would be getting a government stipend for these jawns
New playlist THE ORIGIN OF POP-AS-GENRE 1976-1996, a chronological story of how POP became a genre distinct from disco, R&B, rock, house, etc
Spotify:
Apple:
YouTube:
Track listing:
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I'm inclined to read the loud silence about Iraq precisely the other way around: as *proof* of its massive influence. It's so big that we (as a society) don't know where to begin, or even that we need to.
"Those who lived through [the Iraq War] might have assumed it would mark our culture for a generation...Instead, it is often an ordeal to persuade the young what a saga it all was...At least in the western world, the Iraq war has left litte trace." Ganesh:
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I interviewed my old friend Linda Huang, a brilliant book cover designer, about making the cover for PLANES. She shared a lot of early sketches/drafts . Fascinating.
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Most writing about Knausgaard is extremely low-insight. Lots of it describes his work in ways that are flatly inaccurate. Here's a welcome exception on both fronts, from a great thinker of our times
“Evenings that no one else can remember live in you, when the snow touched your face or the rain caught you unprepared, when you were all alone and yet marked by all the others who have made you who you are.”
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Prospect Magazine piece about New York Review Classics and New Directions representing two paths for US politics.
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A first tonight: Zooming into a book club that read PLANES. Truly delightful experience. Please invite me to your book club, and tell your bookclubbing friends and relatives I'm available ...
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every year shopping for plans on healthcare dot gov sends me into a depressive funk. it's such a dumb system. it's sooooo dumb. and we live inside it.
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Shiv will bring back Bookforum
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it happened to me: my agent dropped me, citing his need for more time to chase 'literary It Girls'
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I'm in the NYTimes "Paperback Row" this weekend, and you've spent one of your 600 tweets reading about it.
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my New Year's Rez is not to be shy about shouting my debut novel from the rooftops any chance I get.
it's called PLANES, it's out May 31 from
@AAKnopf
, and it's about daily life in the long shadow cast by post-9/11 rendition and torture.
more soon!
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we're having another baby in February so I'm reflecting on lessons learned from first. main thing I've come up with is pandemics are pretty bad.
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One week to go! Please pre-order from your favorite local bookstore (or online) if you're inclined to help PLANES make its way in the world.
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@davegillis
You seem v. thoughtful. In that spirit, I wonder if you would consider reading a deep history of any development from history that you consider 'very bad,' paying special attention to what it sounds like when people in positions like yours insist they are trying to make it better
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going to take some restraint on my part not to tweet the entirety of this movingly perceptive review of my novel, by a critic I respect immensely
“Within the small aperture of the novelistic gaze, Peter Baker finds a way to talk about terrorism and torture unavailable on the plane of geopolitics.” Toral Jatin Gajarawala assesses Peter C. Baker’s novel “Planes."
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They call it the 'back of the book' for a reason, Shiv. And I don't think it's a very nice reason. And I don't plan to get stuck finding out.
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tired: putting Lauren Oyler on the Goop boat
wired: sending ME to the Immersive Great Gatsby Experience
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good mail day. I love paperbacks. on sale in a month. please buy one or two or a crateload.
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