Full name: Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction

Author: Charles Baxter Year: 1997 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, Essays Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9781555975081 1555975089

"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. Similar books: 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 Literary Occasions by V. S. Naipaul Break Every Rule by Carole Maso On Writers & Writing by John Gardner Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood 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 The Moronic Inferno by Martin Amis Living by Fiction by Annie Dillard Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic 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