BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE

For fiction lovers, history and social commentary on the genre is a thought-provoking addition to reading. Novelist Charles Baxter's essays on contemporary fiction dissect the connections between life, values, and art with unerring and insightful precision. Baxter compares the dysfunction in contemporary fiction to the removal of the villain from politics. He decries the prostituting of epipha ny as a commercial product that turns fiction into a pseudo-instruction manual, and he reveals the magic within Donald Barthelme's i nnovativ...[Read more]