The Wave in the Mind
by Ursula K. Le Guin | 
Curious Pursuits
by Margaret Atwood | 
To Show and to Tell
by Phillip Lopate | 
Daemon Voices
by Philip Pullman |
Break Every Rule
by Carole Maso | 
New Ways to Kill Your Mother
by Colm Toibin | 
Time Bites
by Doris Lessing | 
Reflections
by Diana Wynne Jones |
The Art of Subtext
by Charles Baxter | 
Living by Fiction
by Annie Dillard |
Finding a Form
by William H. Gass | 
Quarrel & Quandary
by Cynthia Ozick | 
Draft No. 4
by John McPhee |
Henry Miller on Writing
by Henry Miller | 
Changing My Mind
by Zadie Smith | 
Small Wonder
by Barbara Kingsolver | 
The Lost Tools of Learning
by Dorothy L. Sayers | 
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
by Italo Calvino | 
Lectures on Literature
by Vladimir Nabokov | 
The Great Movies
by Roger Ebert |
"Lately I've been possessed of a singularly unhappy idea: The greatest influence on American fiction for the last twenty years may have been Richard Nixon." What happens to American fiction in a time when villains are deprived of their villainy; when our consumer culture insists on happy endings? Did Richard Nixon start a trend of dysfunctional narration that is now rife throughout fiction? In Burning Down the House, Baxter delves into the social and political circumstances that influence today's "urgent issues of storytelling." Baxter invites unexpected connections: between gossip and characterization; between Puritanism, consumerism, and epiphanies; between violence and data processing. By asking readers to "explore the imagination's grip on daily life and how one lives in the pressure of that grip, " Baxter offers a unique perspective into the reading and writing of contemporary fiction.