Charles Baxter - Bibliography

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Burning Down the House

Charles Baxter

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Saul and Patsy

Charles Baxter

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.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 2004, 2003, Hardcover - 2003, 2003

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The Feast of Love

Charles Baxter

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Other editions: 2003, Hardcover - 2000

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A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations

Charles Baxter

Three generations of writers celebrate a master whose life and work continue to reverberate in contemporary letters.
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.

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El Festin Del Amor

Charles Baxter

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A Relative Stranger: Stories

Charles Baxter

In this masterful collection, the author's wise and subtle stories often find lonely, restless characters embarking on unexpected courses of action that evolve in puzzling, yet oddly logical ways. "Baxter's strength as a writer derives from his mysterious, haunting tone . . . and the slightly surreal quality to his characters' conversation. . . ".--Chicago Tribune.

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Other editions: Softcover - 2001, Hardcover - 1990

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Best New American Voices 2001

Charles Baxter

A marvelous collection of fiction by America's best new writers. Upon its launch in 2000, Best New American Voices received acclaim for the range and originality of its selections, which represented the best writing from new American writers who are generally unknown but promise to become the literary stars of tomorrow. For the 2001 edition, National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter, together with series editors John Kulka and Natalie Danford, judged short stories from more than one hundred writing programs around the country to find the very best, most interesting, and most accomplished pieces by outstanding writing students. The result is presented here in a collection of seventeen tales that will be sure to attract attention and critical acclaim. Ranging from stories of passion, loneliness, and humor to masterful accounts of discovery and family politics, and set in locales from Burma and Japan to the Middle West and New England, these tales are eclectic, vivid, and cutting-edge, and showcase the best writing talent of tomorrow.

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Glimmer Train Stories: Number 39

Charles Baxter; Sergio G. Waisman; Siobhan Dowd; Paul Rawlins; Ann Pancake; Gerard Varni; Tiffany Drever; Aaron Cohenk; Randolph Thomas; Mark Rader

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The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting

Charles Baxter

In the latest Graywolf Forum title, editor Charles Baxter invites writers to contemplate "memory," nowadays as likely to be an attribute of a computer as a human being. Have we made personal memory both more precious and more disturbing? Why has there been such an explosion of interest in the memoir, and how are we using forgetfulness? Essays range from Patricia Hampl's revelations about the cost of exposing other people's secrets, to Bernard Cooper's confessions about marketing his memoir.

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Believers

Charles Baxter

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

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1997

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Harmony of the World: Stories

Charles Baxter

In these ten stories, Charles Baxter shows his genius in making his characters' everyday sufferings--and occasional fragile joys--seem utterly unprecedented, even as he 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. Long admired and now once more available in paperback, Harmony of the World is a masterpiece of lucidity and compassion.

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Other editions: Softcover - 1984

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Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

Charles Baxter

In Burning Down the House, critically acclaimed author, Charles Baxter, delves into the dramatic way that social and political circumstances influence the "urgent issues of storytelling". "These essays are meant to incite response and excitement, but they are bracing rather than incendiary, provocative rather than destructive". -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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First Light

Charles Baxter

A car dealer who has never left his Michigan hometown and his younger sister, a brilliant astrophysicist, reunite in this magnificent achievement by "one of the finest of American writers".--Boston Globe.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1987

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Shadow Play: A Novel

Charles Baxter

His wife does gymnastics and magic tricks. His crazy mother invents her own vocabulary, and his aunt writes her own version of the Bible. Through all this, Wyatt Palmer tries to live a normal life. But when he lures a toxic waste producing chemical plant to his economically depressed town, Wyat discovers he has truly made a deal with the Devil.

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1993

Imaginary Paintings

Charles Baxter

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Kelp Forests

Charles Baxter; Judith Connor

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Through the Safety Net

Charles Baxter

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Other editions: Hardcover - 1985

The South Dakota Guidebook

Charles Baxter

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Other editions: 1974

RLS; Stevenson's Letters to Charles Baxter

Charles Baxter; Robert Louis Stevenson; J. De Lancey Ferguson

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Chameleon

Charles Baxter

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