Search results for ""author charles baxter""

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.

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Bob Seger's House and Other Stories is a collection of short stories written by some of Michigan's most well-known fiction writers. This collection of twenty-two short stories serves as a celebration not only of the tenth anniversary of the Made in Michigan Writers Series in 2016 but also of the rich history of writing and storytelling in the region. As series editors Michael Delp and M. L. Leibler state in their preface, ""The stories contained in this anthology are a way to stay connected to each other. Think of them as messages sent from all over the map, stitching readers and writers together through stories that continue to honor the ancient art of the fire tale, the hunting epic, and all of the ways language feeds the blood of imagination.""The scope of this project reflects the dynamic and diverse writing that is currently taking place by people who consider their home to be the Great Lakes state. Stories are far-ranging, from the streets of Detroit and the iconic presence of the auto industry to the wild tracts of the Upper Peninsula, to a couple on the west coast trying to figure out parenting. The book vibrates with that tension, of metal versus rock and human frailty taking on the pitfalls and hardships of living in this world.In his foreword, Charles Baxter asks, ""Does a region give rise to a particular kind of literature? Michigan is so fiercely diverse in its landscapes, its economy, and its population demographics that it presents anybody who wants to write about it with a kind of blank slate. You can't summarize the state easily."" These storytellers exude a ""Michigan aesthetic"" in their writing, something that cannot be learned in a textbook or taught in a classroom but can be felt through the tales of these storytellers.The experience of picking up this collection is akin to taking a drive from the mechanized world and arriving several hours later in one of the wildest places on earth. Readers of short fiction will enjoy the multitude of voices in this anthology.

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Novel of three generations of women on the Nebraska plains

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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.

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