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 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.

Charles Baxter inaugurates The Art of, a new series on the craft of writing, with the wit and intelligence he brought to his celebrated book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction.

Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted. Using an array of examples from Melville and Dostoyevsky to contemporary writers Paula Fox, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore, Baxter explains how fiction writers create those visible and invisible details, how what is displayed evokes what is not displayed.

The Art of Subtext is part of The Art of series, a new line of books by important authors on the craft of writing, edited by Charles Baxter. Each book examines a singular, but often assumed or neglected, issue facing the contemporary writer of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The Art of series means to restore the art of criticism while illuminating the art of writing.

A New York Times Notable Book from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune)

By turns compassionate, gently humorous, and haunting, this collection--sixteen classics with seven new stories--proves William Maxwell's assertion that nobody can touch Charles Baxter in the field that he has carved out for himself.

Whether friends or strangers, the characters in these 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.

A warmly disposed yet unsentimental chronicler of American lives ... Some [stories are] poignant and disturbing, and all of them highly readable. --The New York Times Book Review

There's something I want you to do. This request--sometimes simple, sometimes not--forms the basis for the ten interrelated short stories that comprise this latest penetrating and prophetic collection from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune).

As we follow a diverse group of Minnesota citizens, each grappling with their own heightened fears, responsibilities, and obsessions, Baxter unveils the remarkable in what might otherwise be the seemingly inconsequential moments of everyday life.

From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune)

With his five previous books of fiction, Charles Baxter established himself as a contemporary literary master, in the traditions of Raymond Carver and William Maxwell. This radiant collection confirms Baxter's ability to revel in the surfaces of seemingly ordinary lives while uncovering their bedrock of passion, madness, levity and grief.

Graywolf reissues one of its most successful essay collections with two new essays and a new foreword by Charles Baxter

As much a rumination on the state of literature as a technical manual for aspiring writers, Burning Down the House has been enjoyed by readers and taught in classrooms for more than a decade. Readers are rewarded with thoughtful analysis, humorous one-liners, and plenty of brushfires that continue burning long after the book is closed.

National Book Award Finalist - A superb novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people, from one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune) and the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award

A near perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humaneness, comedy and wisdom. --The Washington Post

The Feast of Love is just that--a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined 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. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, The Feast of Love is a masterful novel.

As two grown siblings explore their complicated history over one hot Fourth of July weekend, they come to terms with the experiences that put such distance between them and discover the imperfect love that ties them--from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune).

Hugh Welch has cared for his little sister Dorsey ever since they were children, when Dorsey looked at him as though he were a god. But when Dorsey returns to their small Michigan hometown with a successful career as an astrophysicist and a happy family life, Hugh, who has a long habit of worrying about his sister, realizes that it's his own life he has to cure, not Dorsey's.

From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune), Saul and Patsy is stunning, never predictable, glimmering fiction, full of mischief and insight (The Los Angeles Times).

Five Oaks, Michigan is not exactly where Saul and Patsy meant to end up. Both from the East Coast, they met in college, fell in love, and settled down to married life in the Midwest. Saul is Jewish and a compulsively inventive worrier; Patsy is gentile and cheerfully pragmatic. On Saul's initiative (and to his continual dismay) they have moved to this small town-a place so devoid of irony as to be virtually a museum of earlier American feelings-where he has taken a job teaching high school.

Soon this brainy and guiltily happy couple will find children have become a part of their lives, first their own baby daughter and then an unloved, unlovable boy named Gordy Himmelman. It is Gordy who will throw Saul and Patsy's lives into disarray with an inscrutable act of violence. As timely as a news flash yet informed by an immemorial understanding of human character, Saul and Patsy is a genuine miracle.

In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes--from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune)

Entirely original.... So craftily construcyed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader should really savor this book twice. --The Washington Post

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 Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, seventeen award-winning writers--all expert teachers--share the secrets of creating compelling, imaginative stories and novels. A combination handbook, writer's companion, and collection of spirited personal essays, the book is filled with specific examples, hard-won wisdom, and compassionate guidance for the developing or experienced fiction writer.
Each of the contributors is a current or former lecturer at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, one of the most highly respected writing programs in the country. Included are essays by Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Karen Brennan, Judith Grossman, Ehud Havazelet, C. J. Hribal, Margot Livesey, Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, Pablo Medina, Antonya Nelson, Susan Neville, Richard Russo, Steven Schwartz, Jim Shepard, Joan Silber, Debra Spark, Peter Turchi, and Chuck Wachtel.
Rich with masterful examples and personal anecdotes, these imaginative essays provide hard-earned insight into a writer's work. The book will interest not only those seeking inspiration and guidance to become stronger writers, but also readers of contemporary literary fiction, who will find a number of surprising and original approaches to the writer's work by award-winning practitioners adept at teaching others what they know.
Charles Baxter is author of several novels, including The Feast of Love, Shadow Play, and First Light. and collections of stories including Believers and A Relative Stranger. He teaches writing at the University of Michigan. Peter Turchi is author of the novel The Girls Next Door, a collection of stories, Magician, and a book of non-fiction, The Pirate Prince. He is Director of the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College.

From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune)--these ten stories show make everyday experiences seem utterly unprecedented, even as Baxter reminds us, gently and with a sly comic twist, that everything they feel is only the collateral damage of being human.

Whether he is writing about the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need, and pity in a friendship that has gone on a few decades too long, Baxter enchants us with the elegant balance of his prose and the unexpectedness of his insights. Harmony of the World is a masterpiece of lucidity and compassion.

William Maxwell, who died in July 2000, was revered as one of the twentieth century's great American writers and a longtime fiction editor at The New Yorker. Now writers who knew Maxwell and were inspired by him--both the man and his work--offer intimate essays, most specifically written for this volume, that bring him back to life, right there in front of us.

Alec Wilkinson writes of Maxwell as mentor; Edward Hirsch remembers him in old age; Charles Baxter illuminates the magnificent novel So Long, See You Tomorrow; Ben Cheever recalls Maxwell and his own father; Donna Tartt vividly describes Maxwell's kindness to herself as a first novelist; and Michael Collier admires him as a supreme literary correspondent. Other appreciations include insightful pieces by Alice Munro, Anthony Hecht, a poem by John Updike, and a brief tribute from Paula Fox. Ending this splendid collection is Maxwell himself, in the unpublished speech The Writer as Illusionist.

Without question Charles Baxter, whose ravishing novel The Feast of Love was a National Book Award finalist, is one of our finest contemporary writers. These two books, set in the Michigan landscape that Baxter has made his own, display his unparalleled gift for revealing the unexpected in everyday life. In the novel Shadow Play, a decent man, having made a devil's bargain, finds himself on that precarious border between personal love and social responsibility. Reading group guide included.

Without question Charles Baxter, whose ravishing novel The Feast of Love was a National Book Award finalist, is one of our finest contemporary writers. These two books, set in the Michigan landscape that Baxter has made his own, display his unparalleled gift for revealing the unexpected in everyday life. The often-curious connections of relatives and strangers are illuminated in the thirteen exquisite stories of A Relative Stranger. You can't just get a brother off the street, a character says, but indeed he does.

A fresh look at this giant of 1960s Pop Art--featuring his billboard-sized images of commercial subjects and combining his eye of an advertising man and the heart of a Pop artist.

Lipsticks, automobiles, dishwashers, men in business suits, spaghetti, rockets, airplanes, hairdryers, ice cream cones and pigtailed girls: James Rosenquist (1933-2017) has always known how to combine these seemingly disparate but always all-American elements into whirlwind, billboard-sized collages. With airbrushed surreal euphoria, he slammed colors, patterns, and objects into one another with the eye of an advertising man and the heart of a Pop artist. This momentous catalogue, published to accompany the first in-depth survey of the artist's work of the 1960s through 1980s, will give long-overdue attention to Rosenquist's singular achievement in American art during these three decades.
From 1957 to 1960, Rosenquist earned his living a billboard painter. This was perfect training, as it turned out, for an artist about to explode onto the pop art scene. Like other pop artists, Rosenquist adapted the visual language of advertising and pop culture (often funny, vulgar, and outrageous) to the context of fine art. An informative essay by art historian Judith Goldman examines the influence of Rosenquist's early days as a billboard painter, his early themes and techniques, and his similarities and differences with other pop artists like Warhol and Lichtenstein. The essay focuses on areas that have only been superficially addressed in the literature to date, bringing the level of Rosenquist scholarship up to that of his Pop Art contemporaries.
For any collector of American art, this gives attention to Rosenquist's singular achievement in American art during these three decades.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - A timely and unsettling novel about the people drawn to--and unmoored by--a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. From the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and one of our most gifted writers (Chicago Tribune).

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 their home city of Minneapolis. She checks the usual places-- churches, storefronts, benches--and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader. 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.

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.

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.

Who says summer reading means a lurid potboiler or sleazy celeb tell-all? Not Tin House. Renowned for its beautiful design as well as its compelling content, the award-winning Tin House is a multisensory delight, as popular with critics as it is with readers. Each issue features the best writers of the day alongside a new generation of talent who are poised to become the most important voices of the future. Its summer issue offers an eclectic collection of short stories, profiles, author interviews, poetry, and essays, as well as unique departments such as Lost and Found, reviews of overlooked or underrated books, and Blithe Spirits and Readable Feast, which present tales and recipes for drinks and food in a literary way. Breezy, sunny, funny, and always thought-provoking, Tin House Summer Reading 2009 is beach reading for the smart set.