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Charles Baxter

(b.1947)

Charles Baxter was born in Minneapolis and graduated from Macalester College, in Saint Paul. After completing graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he taught for several years at Wayne State University in Detroit. In 1989, he moved to the Department of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and its MFA program. He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

Baxter is the author of four novels, four collections of short stories, three collections of poems, and a collection of essays on fiction, and is the editor of other works.

Awards: PEN (2021) see all

Genres: Literary Fiction

Novels

   First Light (1987)
   Shadow Play (1993)
   The Feast of Love (2000)
   Saul and Patsy (2003)
   The Soul Thief (2008)
   The Sun Collective (2020)
   Blood Test (2024)

Collections

   Chameleon (poems) (1970)
   Harmony of the World (1984)
   Through the Safety Net (1985)
   Imaginary Paintings and Other Poems (poems) (1989)
   A Relative Stranger (1990)
   Believers (1997)
   Gryphon (2011)
   There's Something I Want You to Do (2015)

Novellas and Short Stories

The Would-Be Father (2014)

Non fiction show

Books containing stories by Charles Baxter

100 Years of the Best American Short Stories (2015)
(Best American Short Stories)
edited by
Lorrie Moore and Heidi Pitlor

The Best American Short Stories 2014 (2014)
(Best American Short Stories)
edited by
Jennifer Egan

The Best American Short Stories 2013 (2013)
(Best American Short Stories)
edited by
Elizabeth Strout

More books

Awards

2021 PEN/Malamud Award

Award nominations

2000 National Book Award for Fiction (shortlist) : The Feast of Love

Charles Baxter recommends

A Lesser Light (2025)
Peter Geye
"Peter Geye's A Lesser Light has elemental forces within it, powered by weather, Lake Superior, and the conflicts of religion and the heart in the early parts of the twentieth century. This book has qualities that may remind some readers of the novels of Thomas Hardy: a strong woman who is far from the life of the crowd, a detailed attention to work, and a fascinating cast of major and minor characters. This novel is a great feat of literary imagination."

The History of Sound (2024)
Ben Shattuck
"The stories in this beautifully written book toggle between the past and the present, and their subjects include the natural world in and around New England, and, within that natural world, a cultural landscape that includes music, faith, love, and murder. Ben Shattuck is a gifted writer who is wonderfully generous and wide-ranging in his concerns. He cares deeply about those in peril, those in need of help and aid, and his imagination goes out to them. Like the novelists of the 19th century, he looks upon the world with wonder, as if no one had ever really seen it or its secrets or made an account of it before. In every sense, this is a wonderful book."

Beautiful Days (2024)
Zach Williams
"Beautiful Days contains elegant mysteries, and the book stays in the mind long after you've read it."

If I Survive You (2022)
Jonathan Escoffery
"Jonathan Escoffery's brilliant first book has some new things to tell us about racial identities, loneliness, and the search for love. It is so sharp-eyed and detailed that you feel that you are living through its scenes. The book is father-haunted and often very funny, and its prose is electric with intelligence. Somehow If I Survive You manages to be scary, humorous, and heartbreaking all at once. I loved this book."

The Complicities (2022)
Stacey D'Erasmo
"In Stacey D'Erasmo's wonderful new novel, The Complicities, the past catches up to the present and overtakes it. All the scattered misdeeds and cut corners and malfeasances come together as crimes, big and small, and the characters either see the criminality or try to ignore it. But this suspenseful novel sees it all, and I found myself enlightened and deeply moved by its compelling story."

Sirens & Muses (2022)
Antonia Angress
"Brilliant . . . This narrative is intricate, moving, and often funny, and its scenes are beautifully crafted. . . . A wonderful book."

Planes (2022)
Peter C Baker
"The effects of secrets, both personal and political, are on full display in Peter C. Baker's brilliant novel about America's recent history. With great subtlety, this novel quietly shows us what it's like to perform actions that cannot be acknowledged and what the psychic price is for such secrecy. With its fascinating cast of characters, this book is wonderfully readable, and I found its central conflicts to be completely relevant to our time, and unforgettable."

Happy for You (2022)
Claire Stanford
"A novel of fine intelligence, Happy for You is a witty send-up of our algorithm culture that builds to an unexpected and quite beautiful depth of feeling. A terrific debut."

The Care of Strangers (2020)
Ellen Michaelson
"In this fine and wonderful novel, the work of medicine--of saving lives--is closely related to the work of saving oneself, of staying intact under the pressure of work and inherited prejudices. The novel's two protagonists are both heroes and outcasts, and Ellen Michaelson shows us an intricate world of medical care that she knows from the inside out. It's a fascinating story that's both clear-eyed and warm-hearted."

Hannah's War (2020)
Jan Eliasberg
"At the center of this novel you will find love and physics entangled together in the life of a heroic woman whose bravery and brilliance helped to change the course of modern history. Jan Eliasberg's extraordinary novel is a fictionalized version of what really happened, and despite its serious subject matter, the story moves forward with great speed and power, giving off both heat and light. This is a great story about a woman of genius."

The Weight of a Piano (2019)
Chris Cander
"Like Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, The Weight of a Piano is a visionary work about the madness inherent in all art and the burdens of history that give rise to art and must be carried in turn. The miracle of this wonderful novel is to place an object, weighted with history, in a locale where we would never expect to find it, making the unexpected both palpable and real, and by doing so, this beautiful, intricate novel gives us one indelible picture after another, each one written in a different key."

Tornado Weather (2017)
Deborah E Kennedy
"A wonderful novel. Deborah E. Kennedy's Tornado Weather has a very distinctive energy, and there is real pathos along with subtle humor. The characters are from a social class that is too often overlooked and misrepresented. Kennedy gives them their due, with all their resourcefulness, resilience, and suffering intact."

Refuge (2017)
Dina Nayeri
"For anyone who has wondered about the distance between contemporary American and Iranian lives and thought, this book is essential reading. If any book can close that distance, this one can."

The Madwoman Upstairs (2016)
Catherine Lowell
"Terrific...A mystery, a love story, and a very dark comedy with thee Brontes."

The Quickening (2010)
Michelle Hoover
"Michelle Hoover's fine debut novel recreates for us a way of life and a set of personalities that have vanished from our current scene, and she does so with a solidity of detail that will impress these people and these places forever on your memory."

Dream House (2009)
Valerie Laken
"A perfectly plausible and rational ghost story: sexy, sharp-eyed, and deeply haunted."

How Far Is the Ocean from Here (2008)
Amy Shearn
"Amy Shearn’s first novel is a hugely auspicious debut. Sentence by sentence, the writing stays sharp and memorable, and the plot slyly takes us on a road-trip that is both frightening and comic."

Homestead (1998)
Rosina Lippi
"An intricately braided narrative about a place that will be, for most readers, at first foreign and then familiar. Homestead is a book of marvels."

Bend This Heart (1989)
Jonis Agee
"In story after story, the mask drops away from gen-tility, and we come face to face with the truth. These -stories are beautiful because of their courage: there is nothing they are afraid to say"

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