Charles Baxter inaugurates The Art of, a new series on the craft of writing, with the wit and intelligence he brought to his celebrated book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted. Using an array of examples from Melville and Dostoyevsky to contemporary writers Paula Fox, Edward P. Jones, and Lorrie Moore, Baxter explains how fiction writers create those visible and invisible details, how what is displayed evokes what is not displayed. The Art of Subtext is part of The Art of series, a new line of books by important authors on the craft of writing, edited by Charles Baxter. Each book examines a singular, but often assumed or neglected, issue facing the contemporary writer of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry. The Art of series means to restore the art of criticism while illuminating the art of writing.

Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the suppressed, and the secreted. He explains how fiction writers create those visible and invisible details and how what is displayed evokes what is not displayed.

Writing Subtext explores all the underlying meanings that lie beneath the words, images, and actions in film, which are also applicable to any kind of fiction writing. Replete with examples from films, as well as examples from real life, Writing Subtext helps the writer figure out how to find and write subtext.

This book makes a science of intuition and puts it to work where it counts--o n the job. Fast, author of Body Language, shows that the subtext, the stream of communication running beneath the surface, is what makes that communication more effective. Subtext can help gain promotions, manange employees, and increase sales, by combining behavioral psychology and body language principles.

Subtexts are all around us. In conversation, business transactions, politics, literature, philosophy, and even love, the art of expressing more than what is explicitly said allows us to live and move in the world. But rarely do we reflect on this subterranean dimension of communication. In this book, renowned classicist and scholar of rhetoric Laurent Pernot explores the fascinating world of subtext. Of the two meanings present in any instance of double meaning, Pernot focuses on the meaning that is unstated—the meaning that counts. He analyzes subtext in all its multifarious forms, including allusion, allegory, insinuation, figured speech, irony, innuendo, esoteric teaching, reading between the lines, ambiguity, and beyond. Drawing on examples from figures as varied as Homer, Shakespeare, Molière, Proust, Foucault, and others, as well as from popular culture, Pernot shows how subtext can be identified and deciphered as well as how prevalent and essential it is in human life. With erudition and wit, Pernot explains and clarifies a device of language that we use and understand every day without even realizing it. The Subtle Subtext is a book for anyone who is interested in language, literature, hidden meanings, and the finer points of social relations.

The fifteenth volume in the Art of series takes an expansive view of revision—on the page and in life In The Art of Revision: The Last Word, Peter Ho Davies takes up an often discussed yet frequently misunderstood subject. He begins by addressing the invisibility of revision—even though it’s an essential part of the writing process, readers typically only see a final draft, leaving the practice shrouded in mystery. To combat this, Davies pulls examples from his novels The Welsh Girl and The Fortunes, as well as from the work of other writers, including Flannery O’Connor, Carmen Machado, and Raymond Carver, shedding light on this slippery subject. Davies also looks beyond literature to work that has been adapted or rewritten, such as books made into films, stories rewritten by another author, and the practice of retconning in comics and film. In an affecting frame story, Davies recounts the story of a violent encounter in his youth, which he then retells over the years, culminating in a final telling at the funeral of his father. In this way, the book arrives at an exhilarating mode of thinking about revision—that it is the writer who must change, as well as the writing. The result is a book that is as useful as it is moving, one that asks writers to reflect upon themselves and their writing.

Walter Mosley is one of America’s bestselling novelists, known for his critically acclaimed series of mysteries featuring private investigator Easy Rawlins. His writing is hard-hitting, often limned with a political subtext, and aimed at a broad audience. Years ago, when Mosley was working on a doctorate in political theory, he envisioned writing very different kinds of books from those for which he has become celebrated. But once you’ve been tagged as a novelist, and in Mosley’s case, a genre writer, even a bestselling one, it is hard to get an airing for ideas that cross those boundaries. Folding the Red into the Black has grown out of Mosley’s public talks, which have gotten both enthusiastic and agitated responses, making him feel the ideas in those talks should be explored in greater depth. Mosley’s is an elastic mind, and in this short polemic he frees himself to explore some novel ideas. He draws on personal experiences and insights as an African-American, a Jew, and one of our great writers to present an alternative manifesto of sorts: “We need to throw off the unbearable weight of bureaucratic capitalist and socialist demands; demands that exist to perpetuate these systems, not to praise and raise humanity to its full promise. And so I propose the word, the term Untopia.”