Charles Baxter Collegiate Professor
He/Him
Office Information:
3139 Angell Hall
phone: 734-647-6769
hours: Tues 3-4pm; Thurs 3-5pm
Writing of Fiction; Graduate Faculty; Novel and Narrative; English; MFA Faculty; Twentieth Century American; Twentieth Century British; American; Creative Writing; British
Education/Degree:
M.A., Boston 1993; B.A., Cambridge 1989; B.S., Manchester 1987Current Courses
ENGLISH 572-001
Workshop in Writing Fiction
Highlighted Work and Publications
The Welsh Girl
Peter Ho Davies
Set in the stunning landscape of North Wales just after D-Day, Peter Ho Davies’s profoundly moving first novel traces the intersection of disparate lives in wartime. When a POW camp is established near her village, seventeen-year-old barmaid Esther Evans finds herself strangely drawn to the camp and its forlorn captives. She is exploring the camp boundary when the astonishing occurs: Karsten, a young German corporal, calls out to her from behind the fence. From that moment on, the two foster a secret relationship that will ultimately put them both at risk. Meanwhile, another foreigner, the German-Jewish... See MoreThe Fortunes
Peter Ho Davies
Sly, funny, intelligent, and artfully structured, The Fortunes recasts American history through the lives of Chinese Americans and reimagines the multigenerational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience.
Inhabiting four lives—a railroad baron’s valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor; Hollywood’s first Chinese movie star; a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes the Asian American community; and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption—this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family...