Fall has swept in to this part of Michigan, bringing with it the low, gray clouds and cool weather of October. But even with the overcast skies of the past few days, my spirits are still high after our State of the Book literary symposium two Saturdays ago. Nearly 900 people attended the symposium’s seven [...]

Editor’s Note: Fritz Swanson has graciously donated time, talent and materials to create a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind edition of Charles Baxter’s poem “Please Marry Me” for The Great Write Off and The State of the Book. The top five FWR fundraisers for The Great Write Off will get one of only 100 copies of the poem [...]

We continue our series on criticism with an essay by special guest Charles Baxter, who was a participant in the 2011 AWP conference panel “The Good Review: Criticism in the Age of Book Blogs and Amazon.com,” moderated by Jeremiah Chamberlin. Joining them were Stacey D’Erasmo, Gemma Sieff, and Keith Taylor. In his essay, Baxter writes that a trustworthy review has “a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it.”

Editor Jeremiah Chamberlin writes an appreciation of the work of his former teacher and mentor, Charles Baxter, on the occasion of the publication of his new book.

Quite early on in The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter gives a tongue-in-cheek suggestion for a compelling story: “give the character exactly what s/he wants, and see what happens.” In Eisenberg’s stories, having what one wants is an unexpectedly fraught condition.