Suspend Your Disbelief

Charles Baxter

Contributor

Charles Baxter is the author of five novels, The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the story collections Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, Harmony of the World, Gryphon: New and Selected Stories, and, most recently, There’s Something I Want You to Do. He has also written two books of criticism and three books of poetry, as well as edited several anthologies. He teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.


Articles

Essays |

Owl Criticism

From the Archives: In this 2011 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.”


Essays |

Owl Criticism

In this 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.”