Charles Baxter – Talking Forks (January 1993)

Charles Baxter explores the life of objects in fiction, considering how writers might employ them to embody spirit or feeling and thus expand the inner world of their stories. His examples from Turgenev, Tolstoy, Woolf, Nabokov, Maxwell, and others not only illustrate a range of approaches, but trace a history of the role of objects in fiction over the past two centuries.