The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter

National Book Award Finalist

From "one of our most gifted writers" (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel
that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between
ordinary people.

The Feast of Love is just that -- 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.

"Supurb.... A near perfect book, as deep as it is broad in its humaneness, comedy and wisdom." -- The Washington Post Book World

Charles Baxteris the author of the novelsThe Feast of Love(nominated for the National Book Award),The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play,andFirst Light,and the story collectionsGryphon,Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net,andHarmony of the World. The stories "Bravery" and "Charity," which appear inThere's Something I Want You to Do,were included inBest American Short Stories.Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.