Burning Down the House: A novel and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Burning Down the House: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Paperback – February 21, Start reading Burning Down the House: A novel on your Kindle in under a minute.
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This is a good read. However, I'm not sophisticated enough to appreciate this author's writing. Someone compared him to Updike and I agree. I may come back to this author. I first came across this book in the public library and few hooked after just reading the first chapter. It's very mind-bobbling at times but that's really what I enjoy most about it, you'll just never know what you're going to expect!
His music is much better than it sounds. This is that kind of book. It is probably thrilling and rewarding if you can swim through the mud to get to the prize. Not for the faint of heart. The stories depend more on plot than redaction. More than once I had to go reread in order to see who was saying what. The tone of the stories is pessimistic, implying a certain realism. The touch is perhaps lighter. Irony, thy name is Minnesota. Baxter's story telling reminds me of Ray Carver. From my perspective, that's a good thing. This book reminds me why.
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Charles Baxter is my favorite author. His stories and characters stay with you for a long time.
If you have not read Charles Baxter before, do yourself a favor and buy this wonderful book. One person found this helpful. See all 56 reviews. Most recent customer reviews. Published 3 months ago. Published 6 months ago. Published 1 year ago. Published on June 29, Published on June 28, Very funny in parts. Published on April 29, Published on April 4, Published on February 4, Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.
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Burning House
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Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. A decade after high school, I began meditating as a way to escape, to lessen my anxiety, to have some little bit of time that was totally for myself. The only comparable experience is reading. My breathing slows, my mind calms, and I feel a sense of peace. My fiction obsession turned into a career when I became a literary editor for a culture website, tasked with churning out multiple posts a day on a subject I cared a great deal about.
A dozen or more packages would arrive at my desk each morning, envelopes filled with hardcovers and paperbacks. The job involved the constant writing of lists and reviews, searching for any morsel of news I could conjure a take on. My day revolved around the hope that Jonathan Franzen would say something that would piss off the internet. Reading three to four books a week. I soon found myself burnt out on fiction.
The thing that had kept me afloat during the darkest times brought me little pleasure anymore. The books, however, kept piling up. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and coffee-table books filled the living room, stacked on shelves and on the floor instead of on bookcases. I kept on reading, but I felt aimless. My grandfather, who kept a number of click pens from different restaurants and hotels on his desk as do I , as well as collections of matchbooks, and magazines, started me down the path when he bought me my first baseball cards.
One of my clearest memories is him taking me to the kind of a trading card shop that seemed ubiquitous during my childhood, and buying me a ten dollar Donruss Mark Grace rookie card. I would go on to handle all my cards that way. I mostly judged the books by their covers, but there was one in particular I became obsessed with, inside and out — a book and a cover that I think sum up so much of my taste: Eventually, baseball cards gave way to comics, comics gave way to rocks and fossils I found on solitary walks.
As I got older, records, old LPs and 45s, mostly blues, soul, garage rock, and other weird and wild post-war American sounds, became my obsession. At some point, my stays in apartments stretched from months to years. My book collection started to grow, bookshelves were purchased, and my focus as a collector switched. I had some new books, but with estate sales and thrift stores routinely picked over by professionals who turned around and resold dollar concert T-shirts and vintage denim for two-to-three hundred times what they paid, I put almost all of my attention on books.
This is the childlike element which a collector mingles with the element of old age. At some point, my primary obsession turned to collecting Vintage Contemporaries from the s. Most people discarded their Vintage Contemporaries somewhere between the Bush and Clinton administrations, along with their giant block cell phones and Oingo Boingo cassettes. That was the fate of so much from the s: By the end of the decade, we wanted nothing to do with any of it.
Vintage Contemporaries
For the most part, people seem to be sharply divided as to how they feel about Vintage Contemporaries. As one Chicago bookseller put it as I strolled up to the counter with six different editions: The titles came in different colors, but always the same font: It is, admittedly, a lot to take in.
You could pick out any cover as an example of everything people considered good and horrible about s design. What everybody can agree on is the quality of the titles and the lingering influence of their authors: My grandfather started me down the path when he bought me my first baseball cards. Numerous current authors say they attended MFA programs from Syracuse to the Iowa Writers Workshop so that they could learn from various Vintage Contemporaries authors.
I wonder how many of these young authors picked up the old paperbacks in thrift stores and discovered an early influence. I dreamed of having the work framed on my wall. Today, book cover illustrations are splashed across T-shirts, mugs, and just about anything that can be sold in an Etsy shop. I wanted to understand why, if any reason existed in the first place, the art was picked for the particular title.
I had to find out what connection, if any, these images had with their books. More straight-forward now, sometimes the covers were still pretty, but often times nowhere near as interesting to me as that first generation. And even without the dot matrix and white background, the cover of the V. That, maybe more than anything else, might help begin to explain my fondness for the covers. In the mids, when I was 5 or 6, I visited the Art Institute of Chicago for the first time on a field trip from my school in Skokie, Illinois. You probably know it: Even as a young child on my first ever visit to an art museum, I remember looking at that one work of art and not understanding what I was feeling.
There was something unsettling about it, something lonely, but also something beautiful and maybe familiar.
Vintage Contemporaries
I can go back to that moment, a little sliver of time wedged between years of family trauma. I can recall standing there and looking at the painting, some strange, uneasy feeling washing over me.
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