Saul and Patsy

Saul and Patsy
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307427617

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.

The Sun Collective

The Sun Collective
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1984899716

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.

The Soul Thief

The Soul Thief
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2008-02-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307377091

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.

The Feast of Love

The Feast of Love
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2009-05-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307565696

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.

Through the Safety Net

Through the Safety Net
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 228
Release: 1998-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

A contemporary master of short fiction dives into the undercurrents of middle-class American life in these eleven arresting, often mesmerizing stories.

Believers

Believers
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679776532

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, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. 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.

Believers

Believers
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 290
Release: 1998-09-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0679776532

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, William Maxwell, and Alice Munro. 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.

The Would-be Father

The Would-be Father
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 28
Release: 2014-12-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101911662

From the collection Gryphon, Charles Baxter’s luminous story of caretaking under any circumstance. Burrage never thought he’d be the responsible one. When his brother and sister-in-law die in a car accident, he becomes caretaker to his young nephew, a fragile boy who wants to know what the future will be. Burrage begins writing the boy’s horoscope—stars, trains, and hide-and-seek—until his predictions begin to fail, in a rowboat, in the middle of a lake. Charles Baxter is one of our finest short story writers, a modern master. “The Would-be Father” is one of his first published short stories. An eBook short.

A Relative Stranger

A Relative Stranger
Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2001
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780393322200

Set in the Michigan landscape that Charles Baxter has made his own, these thirteen exquisite stories illuminate the often curious connections of relatives and strangers. "You can't just get a brother off the street," says the narrator of the title story, but indeed he does. In another, a woman tries to elude her lover's voice by spending an entire day without words. A marriage is jostled by the departure of a friend during a snowstorm. Baxter's stories tend to be love stories, but it is love tinged with fear, even danger, where shock, comedy, and love combine in unexpected ways. Book jacket.

Hard Choices

Hard Choices
Author: David B. Hamilton
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780877455363

As editor David Hamilton notes in his introduction to this eclectic anniversary volume of nearly eighty poems and stories, "To a considerable extent we have defined ourselves by them; thus Hard Choices, a generous sampling of the best and most interesting writing from the Iowa Review's first years, defines the past and the future of American literature.".