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.

Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted. Using an array of examples from Melville and Dostoyevsky to contemporary writers Paula Fox, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore, Baxter explains how fiction wri...
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L on Bloy: A Study in Impatience is neither criticism nor canonization. Instead, Albert B guin simply presents the person and the preacher of the "Pilgrim of the Absolute," a man with brilliant insights into the world as it could be and terrible impatience with the world as it was. Bloy's writings shed a tremendous, at times blinding, light upon the central mysteries of human existence. Readers who have encountered Bloy in his novels or in his diary (The Pilgrim of the Absolute) will find in B guin a worthy guide in the journey to understanding--and respec...
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In the early nineteenth century, a series of murders took place in and around London which shocked the whole of England. The appalling nature of the crimes--a brutal slaying in the gambling netherworld, the slaughter of two entire households, and the first of the modern lust-murders--was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight, but also by the efforts of some of the keenest minds of the period to uncover the gruesomest details of the killings.

These slayings all took place against the backdrop of a London in which the splendo...
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Many critics agree with C. S. Lewis that ""Satan is the best drawn of Milton's characters."" Satan is certainly a wonderful creation, but Adam and Eve are also complex and well-drawn, and God may be the most complicated character of all. Paradise Lost is above all God's story; it is his discontent, first with Lucifer and then with human beings, that drives the action from the beginning until his anger subsides at the world's end.

God and Satan have similarities not only in their pursuit of revenge, but also in their craving for power and glory. The ambitious Satan wants more ...
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When he accepted the invitation to deliver the Jefferson Lecture--our nation's highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement--Wendell Berry wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair during Late Capitalism. The result is the greatest speech he has delivered in his six decades of public life. With this transcript of his speech, along with heretofore uncollected essays, It All Turns on Affection will take its place as another major testament to Berry's co...
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