Charles Baxter

Baxter has written novels and stories for decades, The Feast of Love among them, but a good many writers know him first for the craft books. Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext argue for what a story declines to say: the pause, the thing under the dialogue, the scene that means something other than its content. They are read in workshops everywhere and are unusually free of rules. He taught for years at Michigan and then Minnesota, and grew up outside Minneapolis, which is where most of the fiction sits.