Charles Baxter

From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune) comes a comic novel about a divorced Midwestern dad who takes a cutting-edge medical test and learns that he has a predisposition to murder. In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the excessively macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.

In this book, Baxter offers several sharp, articulate, and provocative essays that examine the many forces currently shaping contemporary American fiction. As noted in The Washington Times : "What elevates this collection from the status of technical manual (which it also is, and a brilliant one at that) is Mr. Baxter's rare ability to gauge the capacities of fiction for conveying an image not only of individual existence, but of the characteristic feel of a time, a culture, a way of life." Charles Baxter is also the author of the novels First Light and Shadow Play , the story collections Harmony of the World , Through the Safety Net , A Relative Stranger , and Believers, and Imaginary Paintings , a book of poetry. He was recently honored with an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and currently teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In this book, Baxter offers several sharp, articulate, and provocative essays that examine the many forces currently shaping contemporary American fiction. As noted in The Washington Times : "What elevates this collection from the status of technical manual (which it also is, and a brilliant one at that) is Mr. Baxter's rare ability to gauge the capacities of fiction for conveying an image not only of individual existence, but of the characteristic feel of a time, a culture, a way of life." "The most pleasurable and instructive book on the craft since John Gardner's The Art of Fiction ."— City Pages "Brilliant . . . Baxter displays his characteristic wit and intelligence as he muses about the influences of culture and politics on the art of storytelling."— Ploughshares "[This book] is a pleasure to read, and it performs an important function—by mucking around in the problems that plague contemporary fiction, Burning Down the House may spur both readers and writers first to a recognition of guilty complicity and then to constructive thought."— The New York Times Book Review "Readers are rewarded with great one-liners, thoughtful ruminations on the state of literature, and plenty of brush fires that continue burning long after the book is closed."— The San Francisco Bay Guardian "I've heard Baxter talk at Warren Wilson . . . He's the smartest fiction theorist going."— Alan B. Williamson, University of California, Davis " Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter is one of the finest books on craft that I've yet to read. I regularly urge my fiction writing students to add it to their personal libraries."— Carol Zoref, Sarah Lawrence College "[Baxter is] an expert, as uninterested as it's humanly possible to be in self-display, illuminating what he loves. [This book is] both lively and vital, no easy marriage, no small feat. I had read nearly all the essays before, some of them five or six times, but they still were fresh indivually and made something new as a whole. What Baxter does in this book is to locate a significance of fiction in contemporary life (not just its significance for him, but certainly that), and to describe some of the best technique for achieving this significance, embodying it. His favored strategy in these essays is debunking, the melodrama and epiphany essays being the most obvious examples. . . . It's good work, morally good work, as well as excellent work as criticism and propaedeutic. It is also simply a pleasure to have this person's company-in-print-in this book, a lifetime of large learning worn lightly and given freely."— Michael Ryan, University of California, Irvine

Ever since the publication of The Harmony of the World in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s finest short-story writers. Each subsequent collection— Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger, and Believers —was further confirmation of his his gift for capturing the immediate moment, for revealing the unexpected in the ordinary, for showing how the smallest shock can pierce the heart of an intimacy. Gryphon brings together the best of Baxter’s previous collections with seven new stories, giving us the most complete portrait of his achievement.   Baxter once described himself as “a Midwestern writer in a postmodern age”: at home in a terrain best known for its blandness, one that does not give up its secrets easily, whose residents don’t always talk about what’s on their mind, and where something out of the quotidian—some stress, the appearance of a stranger, or a knock on the window—may be all that’s needed to force what lies underneath to the surface and to disclose a surprising impulse, frustration, or desire. Whether friends or strangers, the characters in Baxter’s stories share a desire—sometimes muted and sometimes fierce—to break through the fragile glass of convention. In the title story, a substitute teacher walks into a new classroom, draws an outsized tree on the blackboard on a whim, and rewards her students by reading their fortunes using a Tarot deck. In each of the stories we see the delicate tension between what we want to believe and what we need to believe.   By turns compassionate, gently humorous, and haunting, Gryphon proves William Maxwell’s assertion that “nobody can touch Charles Baxter in the field that he has carved out for himself.”

The Feast of Love is a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined A Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones. In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart Their voices resonate with each other—disparate people joined by the meanderings of love—and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life.

As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes.From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune)--a timely and unsettling novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places--churches, storefronts, benches--and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who's convinced he may start a revolution. As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in the city of Minneapolis. A vision of modern American society and the specters of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.

From National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune)-- a timely and unsettling new novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual churches, storefronts, benches, and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader that will alter both of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who's convinced he's found direction. As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in suburban, middle-class Minneapolis. A send-up of modern American society and the specters of its consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and violence that punctuate our daily lives.

Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House. Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands , joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext . In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction. Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays―the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”―add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.