Portrays a gallery of middle-class Americans who share upward-bound aspirations and a fear of falling, as they face the defining moments of their lifes

Through the Safety Net (Contemporary American Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Baxter, Charles

Literary

Penguin??Books

Hugh Welch has cared for his little sister Dorsey ever since they were children, when Dorsey looked at him as though he were a god. But when Dorsey returns to their small Michigan hometown with a successful career as an astrophysicist and a happy family life, Hugh, who has a long habit of worrying about his sister, realizes that it’s his own life he has to cure, not Dorsey’s. As they explore their complicated history over one hot Fourth of July weekend, they’ll come to terms with the experiences that put such distance between them and discover the imperfect love that ties them as siblings.

First Light (Contemporary American Fiction)

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.

A Relative Stranger (Contemporary American Fiction)

Contemporary

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.

Shadow Play: A Novel

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. Baxter once described himself as “a Midwestern writer in a postmodern age”: at home in a terrain best known for its blandness, one that does not give up its secrets easily, whose residents don’t always talk about what’s on their mind, and where something out of the quotidian—some stress, the appearance of a stranger, or a knock on the window—may be all that’s needed to force what lies underneath to the surface and to disclose a surprising impulse, frustration, or desire. Whether friends or strangers, the characters in Baxter’s stories share a desire—sometimes muted and sometimes fierce—to break through the fragile glass of convention. In the title story, a substitute teacher walks into a new classroom, draws an outsized tree on the blackboard on a whim, and rewards her students by reading their fortunes using a Tarot deck. In each of the stories we see the delicate tension between what we want to believe and what we need to believe. By turns compassionate, gently humorous, and haunting, Gryphon proves William Maxwell’s assertion that “nobody can touch Charles Baxter in the field that he has carved out for himself.”

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

United States

Pantheon

Late one night, a man wakes from a bad dream and decides to take a walk through his neighborhood. After catching sight of two lovers entangled on the football field, he comes upon Bradley Smith, friend and fellow insomniac, and Bradley begins to tell a series of tales--a luminous narrative of love in all it’s complexity. We meet Kathryn, Bradleys’ first wife, who leaves him for another woman, and Diana, Bradley’s second wife, more suitable as a mistress than a spouse. We meet Chlo? and Oscar, who dream of a life together far different from the sadness they have known. We meet Esther and Harry, whose love for their lost son persists despite his contempt for them. And we follow Bradley on his nearly magical journey to conjugal happiness.

The Feast of Love (Vintage Contemporaries)

Vintage

A New York Times Notable Book "A warmly disposed yet unsentimental chronicler of American lives.... Some [stories are] poignant and disturbing, and all of them highly readable." --The New York Times Book Review "One of our best storytellers." --San Francisco Chronicle "Baxter lovingly teases anguish, humor, and heart-rending beauty out of clear, unaffected sentences." --The Washington Post Since the publication of his first story collection in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America’s finest short story writers. Gryphon brings together sixteen classics with seven new stories, giving us the most complete portrait of his achievement. From the bestselling author of The Feast of Love.

Gryphon: New and Selected Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

First Light (Vintage Contemporaries)

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. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Saul and Patsy: A Novel

Here is an extraordinary new novel from one of our most admired and acclaimed writers, a creator of "stunning, never predictable, glimmering fiction, full of mischief and insight” (Los Angeles Times). During Nathaniel Mason’s first few months as a graduate student in upstate New York, he 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 to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel’s past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. It is Jerome who seems to trigger the events that precipitate Nathaniel’s total breakdown, and Jerome who shows up 30 years later--Nathaniel having finally reconstituted his life--to suggest, with the most staggering consequences, that Nathaniel’s identity may in fact not be his own. In The Soul Thief, Charles Baxter has given us one of his most beautifully wrought and unexpected works of fiction: at once lyrical and eerie, acutely observant in its sensual and emotional detail and audaciously metaphysical in its underpinnings. It is a brilliant novel--one that is certain to expand both his already-stellar reputation and his readership.

The Soul Thief: A Novel

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Books by Baxter, Charles