Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

by Charles Baxter

Overview

Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House.

Charles Baxter’s new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction.

Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays—the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective “letter to a young poet”—add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450918
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	449,494
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Charles Baxter is the author of fourteen books, most recently the novel The Sun Collective. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Hometown:

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Date of Birth:

May 13, 1947

Place of Birth:

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Education:

B. A., Macalester College, 1969; Ph.D., State University of New York at Buffalo, 1974

Website:

http://www.charlesbaxter.com

Table of Contents

Preface ix

The Request Moment, or "There's Something I Want You to Do" 3

Inventories and Undoings 25

Things About to Disappear: The Writer as Curator 47

Captain Happen: Some Notes on Narrative Urgency 65

Lush Life 81

Two Interludes 101

What Happens in Hell 103

All the Dark Nights-a Letter 115

Charisma and Fictional Authority-

Nine Fragments toward an Essay 133

Wonderlands 157

Toxic Narratives, and the Bad Workshop 181

On the Plausibility of Dreams 203

Notes on the Dramatic Image: An Essay in Six Parts 225

Acknowledgments 251

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/23/2022

Novelist Baxter (The Sun Collective) combines memoir with writing tips in this eclectic collection. In “The Request Moment, or ‘There’s Something I Want You to Do’,” he makes a case that inserting a request into a story can save ones that “sit there” and do nothing, while “Inventories and Undoings” offers a reading of William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and a reflection on his experience sorting through his dead brother’s belongings. This autobiographical bent extends to “What Happens in Hell,” about a terrifying car crash that happened after his limo driver fell asleep at the wheel. In the title essay, Baxter recounts a course he taught at the University of Minnesota on “seemingly haunted narratives,” with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight as examples: “you know you’ve entered a Wonderland when someone says, ‘There’s something bad and weird in the air,’” he writes. Baxter’s voice is erudite, witty, and humble, and he brings his observations together with smart quips on the writing life: “I think writers should make their own mistakes.... Why should anyone try to avoid failure, mistakes, heartbreak, sorrow, drunkenness, sexual confusion, and apathy?” Budding novelists, take note. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary. (July)

Publishers Weekly

I have no doubt that [Baxter’s] collection of craft essays will be both illuminating and beautiful. . . . A revelatory craft book is a rare and wonderful gift for a writer-slash-reader, and I look forward to devouring this one."—Jessie Gaynor, Literary Hub

“Baxter’s voice is erudite, witty, and humble, and he brings his observations together with smart quips on the writing life . . . Budding novelists, take note.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“It is always gratifying to spend time with a smart writer who has taken the time to study narrative, how it works, what the construction of stories tells us about ourselves.”—Lori Soderlind, The New York Times

“Request, inventory, disappearance, lushness, charisma. You probably won't find these terms in any writing tutorial. But in the set of sparkling essays that make up Wonderlands, celebrated Minnesota author Charles Baxter draws on this vocabulary to show how writers can put flesh on the bones of a good tale. . . . Wonderlands will take you on some fascinating jaunts.”—Tom Zelman, The Star Tribune

“Nearly every essay, including Baxter’s pieces on toxic narrative, dreams, and dramatic imagery, is hybridized with personal anecdotes that inspire, explain, and empathize.”—Joseph Peschel, The Brooklyn Rail

From the Publisher

2022-04-12
A veteran author of the craft extolls the many rewards of literature.

In his third nonfiction book, novelist and short story writer Baxter unites the “personal and impersonal, the subjective and the objective.” He describes “Wonderland” as a “small but important subcontinent of Literature” where the “setting is as alive as the characters are, if not more so….The House of Usher looks out at you as you approach it. When you think of Stephen King’s or Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, you think of the Overlook Hotel, which has a mind of its own, as does Poe’s House of Usher.” In the first essays, Baxter gently delves into the intriguing technique of how requests, like Lady Macbeth’s request that Macbeth kill Duncan, often set “stories with a particular urgency into motion.” The author ponders how some characters’ strange names—Ahab, Flem Snopes, Bathsheba Everdene—“are their story.” After “being used, the name has been retired.” He notes that “something in the nature of fiction loves inventories and lists,” as he works his way through works by Ayad Akhtar, Thomas Hardy, and William Maxwell. In a nostalgic piece about the author “curator,” Baxter champions writers who preserve “what everyone else is discarding” or forgetting. Rather than just letting a narrative simmer, some writers like to heat it up “in order to cook properly.” Even Chekhov, a master of the “low-temperature situation,” sometimes lets things “boil over,” as in Uncle Vanya. Baxter also probes Under the Volcano’s use of a “hot and often extravagant style” in a postmodernist age that encourages the “cooler end of the emotional spectrum.” In a lengthy, incisive piece on charisma, Baxter writes that in “our literature, America is a breeding ground of confidence men,” pointing to Muriel Spark’s “female Ahab” in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (“reading it is a bit like watching laboratory mice jumping around after being given periodic shocks”) and James McBride’s John Brown in The Good Lord Bird.

Cozy, writerly advice and analysis delivered in a restrained, welcoming manner.

Kirkus Reviews