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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