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
A New York Times Notable Book
"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
"One of our best storytellers." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Baxter lovingly teases anguish, humor, and heart-rending beauty out of clear, unaffected sentences." --The Washington Post
Since the publication of his first story collection in 1984, Charles Baxter has slowly gained a reputation as one of America's finest short story writers. Gryphon brings together sixteen classics with seven new stories, giving us the most complete portrait of his achievement.
From the bestselling author of The Feast of Love.
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