Washoe County Library System

In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel?first published in 1986 and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback?the author of Vox and The Fermata uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying ones shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. Nicholson Bakers...