Showing results by author "Charles Baxter" in All Categories

The first book in The Art Of series of books on the craft of writing, fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted.

Dickens and Hardy knew it, and Chaucer knew it before them: the face can be a powerful expression of personality. So why, in the last hundred years, has literature increasingly put its characters behind masks?

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.

Starships come in many shapes and sizes. Their crews and passengers are an eclectic lot. They venture into the deep voids of space on their assigned missions. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they do not. This collection tells the stories of the crews and passengers aboard six of these starships.

*A NEW YORK TIMES 2021 NOTABLE BOOK* 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...