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...