Charles Baxter

A seemingly happy domestic scene is turned upside down by the obsessive attentions of a troubled sixteen-year-old boy.

Brings together the best of Baxter's previous collections, with seven new stories, giving us the most complete portrait of his achievement.

Describes the lives of two orphan girls, one from the Caucasus who is sold into the sex trade, the other who is adopted into the wealthy Zane family of New York, whose unwitting involvement in the world of international crime precipitates their downfall.

"After eighteen years of marriage, a man wakes up one morning to find his wife standing in the bedroom doorway with her bags packed, leaving him with no explanation. Alone in their Copenhagen apartment, he tries to make sense of his marriage and his life. Memories of driving a cab, quiet walks in the snow, and intense sojourns in Paris and New York pass through his mind in fleeting visual images. The more he thinks of his wife, however, the more mysterious she becomes to him. Slowly he realizes that two people can live together for years without ever really knowing each other, and that the most important encounters in life are dictated by chance, not design."--BOOK JACKET.

"William Maxwell, who died in July 2000, was revered as one of the twentieth century's great American writers and a long-time fiction editor at The New Yorker. Now writers who knew Maxwell and were inspired by him - both the man and his work - offer intimate essays, most specifically written for this volume, that "bring him back to life, right there in front of us."" "Three generations of writers are represented. Alec Wilkinson writes of Maxwell as mentor; Edward Hirsch remembers him in old age; Charles Baxter illuminates the magnificent novel So Long, See You Tomorrow; and Benjamin Cheever recalls Maxwell and his own father. Donna Tartt describes Maxwell's kindness to her as a first novelist; and Michael Collier admires him as a supreme literary correspondent. Other appreciations include pieces by Alice Munro and Anthony Hecht, a poem by John Updike, and a brief tribute by Paula Fox. Rounding out this collection is Maxwell himself, in the unpublished speech "The Writer as Illusionist.""--BOOK JACKET.

"The ten inter-related stories in [this collection] are held together by a surreally intricate web of cause and effect--one that slowly ensnares both fictional bystanders and ... readers"--Dust jacket flap.

Exiled by his father from his farm on the coast of Ireland because of his refusal to fight for the High King, Corban embarks on a search for his missing twin sister, Mav, kidnapped and taken as a slave during a Viking raid on the farm.

Many critics have sought to describe Charles Baxter's unparalleled gift for revealing the unexpected in the ordinary, for capturing the fleeting moments that indelibly define a life, for articulating the moral and emotional quandaries that can besiege us as we balance love and responsibility. All these hallmarks of Baxter's work are on brilliant display in Believers, his fourth collection of short fiction. In "Reincarnation" the last hours of a summer dinner party find three couples musing about their previous lives and recalling those instances of recognition that have the power to transform them in the here and now. In "The Cures for Love" a young woman, a classicist distraught over a love affair gone bad, finds unexpected help and solace in the words of Ovid. And in the title novella, a piece that has the tonal control of a concerto, a father's fall from grace is related in his son's story about "fascism and believers, a story of the American Midwest and how I came to be conceived and brought into the world by a priest." In each of the stories gathered here we see the delicate intersection of faith and conviction: between what we want to believe and what we need to believe.

149 p. ; 21 cm

Ein Alptraum reißt den Schriftsteller Charles aus dem Schlaf. Er weiß, dass er keine Ruhe mehr findet und beschließt einen Spaziergang zu machen. Er trifft seinen Freund Bradley Smith der, so wie er, die Nacht betrachtet. Die beiden beginnen zu rden - über die Liebe und über das Leben. Und so entfaltet sich ein ganzes Panorma von Geschichten, in denen es stets um das Eine geht: Gefühle.

While visiting the county fair, a brother and sister are enthralled by a shadow puppet show presentation of "Beauty and the Beast" in which all the shadows are made by one man.

Fenstad's mother -- Westland -- Prowlers -- A relative stranger -- Shelter -- Snow -- Silent movie -- The old fascist in retirement -- Lake Stephen -- Scissors -- Scheherazade -- The disappeared -- Saul and Patsy are pregnant.

"In the current information age, "memory" is as likely to be an attribute of a computer as a human being. In 'Graywolf Forum Three: The Business of Memory, editor Charles Baxter invites twelve creative writers to contemplate the externalization of what was once so deeply personal."--BOOK JACKET.

"First Light is perhaps the best book about astronomy ever written. It tells the story of the men and women at the Palomar Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of California who peer through the amazing Hale Telescope at the farthest edges of space, attempting to solve the riddle of the beginning of time. "Science is a lot weirder and more human than most people realize," Preston writes in his foreword to this revised and updated edition of his first book, and he skillfully weaves together stories of the eccentricities of his characters and the technical wonders of their work to create a riveting narrative about what scientists do and why they do it." "The telescope itself is the main character. It is huge, seven stories tall, the heaviest working telescope on earth, with a mirror that is two hundred inches wide and took fourteen years to cast and polish. The telescope is used by astronomers like James E. Gunn, a "gadgeteer" who scavenges for junk parts and fashions them into sensitive instruments he uses to look into the glittering depths of the universe. Preston's rendering of the obsessions and adventures of Gunn and his colleagues is a witty and illuminating portrait of scientists in action and a luminous story of what modern astronomy is all about."--Jacket.