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Gryphon by Charles Baxter
Requirements: ePUB reader, 2.4 MB
Overview: The publication of a new Charles Baxter book is always cause for celebration, and "Gryphon: New and Selected Stories" is no exception. These stories are like the illuminations on a Medieval manuscript: recognizable characters in miniature, painted in jewel tones in a scale that can't afford one false brush stroke, while hidden in the foliage are fantastical creatures, which are yet familiar as expressions of our own desires and fears.
Baxter is a humanist in the best sense of the term: He is attentive to the varieties of human experience, maintaining affection for his characters even when they're behaving badly, as they often do. He is also an acknowledged master of this form, having won just about every honor there is -- inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology, the Pushcart and O. Henry prizes, etc. This collection includes 11 stories from previous volumes and 13 new ones.
A Baxter story plunges the reader into the psyche and often the soul of his character. Here's the first line of the story "Snow": "Twelve years old, and I was so bored I was combing my hair just for the hell of it." In another story, the narrator says of his mother, who practiced piano for 20 minutes every three years, "She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio -- all of it, every scrap -- made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything."
Baxter's dialogue crackles with the idiosyncrasy of real speech. On Sunday morning after taking a spin on the lake, a grown man recently converted to Christianity visits his resolutely atheist mother. "'Skating after church? Isn't that some sort of doctrinal error?' his mother asks. 'It's just happiness,' Fenstad said."
Happiness -- the search for it, its elusive nature -- is a theme, as are grief, tenderness, and above all, love, in its rainbow of forms. There is the love of a long-married couple slipping into Alzheimer's; of an uncle feeling his way into parenting his dead brother's child; and of a morose child for the grandmother who is raising him. Several stories circle romantic love. A too-handsome man shuttles between his wife and a client who both love him, struggling to genuinely feel. A Swedish man visiting Detroit hopes to have an affair with an American and is royally disoriented by the strange woman he encounters. An arid older businessman is fascinated, repelled, and ultimately moved by his son's passion for a woman who works checkout at a supermarket.
Genre: Literary Fiction , Short Stories
Download Instructions:
https://userscloud.com/lv24q783gvcs
https://rg.to/file/636b272a9de4b19a183d1 ... .epub.html
Requirements: ePUB reader, 2.4 MB
Overview: The publication of a new Charles Baxter book is always cause for celebration, and "Gryphon: New and Selected Stories" is no exception. These stories are like the illuminations on a Medieval manuscript: recognizable characters in miniature, painted in jewel tones in a scale that can't afford one false brush stroke, while hidden in the foliage are fantastical creatures, which are yet familiar as expressions of our own desires and fears.
Baxter is a humanist in the best sense of the term: He is attentive to the varieties of human experience, maintaining affection for his characters even when they're behaving badly, as they often do. He is also an acknowledged master of this form, having won just about every honor there is -- inclusion in the Best American Short Stories anthology, the Pushcart and O. Henry prizes, etc. This collection includes 11 stories from previous volumes and 13 new ones.
A Baxter story plunges the reader into the psyche and often the soul of his character. Here's the first line of the story "Snow": "Twelve years old, and I was so bored I was combing my hair just for the hell of it." In another story, the narrator says of his mother, who practiced piano for 20 minutes every three years, "She had no patience, but since she thought Ohio -- all of it, every scrap -- made sense, she was happy and did not need to practice anything."
Baxter's dialogue crackles with the idiosyncrasy of real speech. On Sunday morning after taking a spin on the lake, a grown man recently converted to Christianity visits his resolutely atheist mother. "'Skating after church? Isn't that some sort of doctrinal error?' his mother asks. 'It's just happiness,' Fenstad said."
Happiness -- the search for it, its elusive nature -- is a theme, as are grief, tenderness, and above all, love, in its rainbow of forms. There is the love of a long-married couple slipping into Alzheimer's; of an uncle feeling his way into parenting his dead brother's child; and of a morose child for the grandmother who is raising him. Several stories circle romantic love. A too-handsome man shuttles between his wife and a client who both love him, struggling to genuinely feel. A Swedish man visiting Detroit hopes to have an affair with an American and is royally disoriented by the strange woman he encounters. An arid older businessman is fascinated, repelled, and ultimately moved by his son's passion for a woman who works checkout at a supermarket.
Genre: Literary Fiction , Short Stories
Download Instructions:
https://userscloud.com/lv24q783gvcs
https://rg.to/file/636b272a9de4b19a183d1 ... .epub.html