Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

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

Author: Charles Baxter
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02/14/2012
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.16w x 0.97d
ISBN: 9780307739520

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 04/01/2012 pg. 28
New York Times Book Review 02/09/2014 pg. 17

About the Author
Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), The Soul Thief, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, and First Light, and the collections Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.