Charles Baxter has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators. The most-rated is The Sun Collective.
The Soul Thief
Summary
National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter earns sweeping critical acclaim for his fiction, which is favorably compared to that of Anton Chekhov and William Trevor. In this compelling novel, graduate student Nathaniel Mason's life changes dramatically when he meets the unusual yet intriguing Jerome Coolberg at a party. Soon, Jerome seems to have appropriated Nathaniel's life, telling personal stories as though they are from his own experiences.
©2008 Charles Baxter (P)2008 Recorded Books
The Feast of Love
Summary
The Feast of Love is a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined Midsummer Night's Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones. In vignettes both comic and sexy, the owner of a coffee shop recalls the day his first wife seemed to achieve a moment of simple perfection, while she remembers the women's softball game during which she was stricken by the beauty of the shortstop. A young couple spends hours at the coffee shop fueling the idea of their fierce love. A professor of philosophy, stopping by for a cup of coffee, makes a valiant attempt to explain what he knows to be the inexplicable workings of the human heart. Their voices resonate with each other, disparate people joined by the meanderings of love, and come together in a tapestry that depicts the most irresistible arena of life. Crafted with subtlety, grace, and power, The Feast of Love is a masterful novel.
©2001 Charles Baxter (P)2005 Phoenix Books, Inc.
There's Something I Want You to Do
Summary
From a contemporary master of the short story, a dazzling new collection--his first in 15 years--that explores the unpredictable and mysterious in seemingly ordinary experience. These interrelated stories are arranged in two sections, one devoted to virtues ("Bravery", "Loyalty", "Chastity", "Charity", and "Forbearance") and the other to vices ("Lust", "Sloth", "Avarice", "Gluttony", and "Vanity"). They are cast with characters who appear and reappear throughout the collection, their actions equally divided between the praiseworthy and the loathsome. They take place in settings as various as Tuscany, San Francisco, Ethiopia, and New York, but their central stage is the North Loop of Minneapolis, alongside the Mississippi River, which flows through most of the tales. Each story has at its center a request or a demand, but each one plays out differently: in a hit-and-run, an assault or murder, a rescue, a startling love affair, or, of all things, a gesture of kindness and charity. Altogether incomparably crafted, consistently surprising, remarkably beautiful stories.
©2015 Charles Baxter (P)2015 Recorded Books
The Sun Collective
Summary
From the National Book Award finalist and "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune) - a timely and unsettling new novel about the people drawn to and unmoored by a local activist group more dangerous than it appears. Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places - churches, storefronts, benches - and stumbles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who's convinced he may start a revolution. As the lives of these four characters intertwine, a story of guilt, anxiety, and feverish hope unfolds in the city of Minneapolis. A vision of modern American society and the specters of the consumerism, fanaticism, and fear that haunt it, The Sun Collective captures both the mystery and the violence that punctuate our daily lives.
©2020 Charles Baxter (P)2020 Random House Audio