Gryphon
New and Selected Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book from the winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune)
By turns compassionate, gently humorous, and haunting, this collection—sixteen classics with seven new stories—proves William Maxwell’s assertion that “nobody can touch Charles Baxter in the field that he has carved out for himself.”
Whether friends or strangers, the characters in these stories share a desire—sometimes muted and sometimes fierce—to break through the fragile glass of convention. In the title story, a substitute teacher walks into a new classroom, draws an outsized tree on the blackboard on a whim, and rewards her students by reading their fortunes using a Tarot deck. In each of the stories we see the delicate tension between what we want to believe and what we need to believe.
"A warmly disposed yet unsentimental chronicler of American lives ... Some [stories are] poignant and disturbing, and all of them highly readable." —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Baxter's skill with short fiction is confirmed in this stellar collection of 23 stories, seven of which are new. The title story is deservedly a classic, and other favorites, such as "Fenstad's Mother," have gathered resonance as well, and the new stories show Baxter working a quirky beat. In each, the acutely observed real world is rocked by the exotic or surreal. In "Poor Devil," the "devils" are a self-destructive couple headed for a divorce, while, in "Ghosts," a stranger enters a young woman's house and tells her they are soul mates. She accuses him of being a devil, but his intentions are much less sinister than she imagines. "Nightfall had always brought his devils out," the narrator says in "The Old Murderer," a touching story about an alcoholic and an ex-con, each trying to get through the day. In "Royal Blue," arguably the best of the new stories, an undertow of mystery shadows a handsome young art dealer who understands that 9/11 has affected a fundamental change in his life. In Baxter's comic-melancholic world, people may be incapable of averting sadness or violence, but they survive.
