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Showing 1 - 17 of 17 matches in All Departments
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.
"Baxter's beguiling novel illuminates the befuddled, searching hearts of a group of strangers in a Michigan town who need and want to love but continue to fall short of their desires. Gorgeous." 'The Feast of Love' is just that – a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In this latter-day 'Midsummer Night's Dream' men and women 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. Crafted with grace, power and humour, 'The Feast of Love' maps the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people. "This novel can cure insomnia. It might even briefly reconcile the reader to life." "Rich, strange, alive with the miracles of daily life, this novel is a banquet for the soul. So many wonderful characters, all of whom I came to cherish. Truly, this is a novel in which the unexpected is always upon us."
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 colours, 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.
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 mastery: 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. "From the Hardcover edition."
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.
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."
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.
"In his quiet cosmic wonderment, Baxter is the equal of John Updike and Anne Tyler at their largest and best."GQ
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.
From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people.
Graywolf reissues one of its most successful essay collections with two new essays and a new foreword by Charles BaxterAs 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.
"In his quiet cosmic wonderment, Baxter is the equal of John Updike and Anne Tyler at their largest and best."GQ
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."
Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books, including The Home Place, also available in a Bison Books edition, and Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award. Charles Baxter is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of numerous works, including The Feast of Love.
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