Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

"With formidable skill and only a few brushstrokes of description, Baxter deftly draws us into his characters' predicaments. . . . One of our best storytellers." --San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] career-encompassing collection.... Baxter's legacy to fiction is clear: For more than twenty-five years he's insisted that we're kidding ourselves a little whenever we call ourselves 'normal.'" --Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Remarkable. The early stories are terrific, and the new stories are terrific. Often, in this type of retrospective, it is obvious how much a writer has matured and developed. Rarely, but as demonstrated in this collection, we're struck by the realization that the writer has always been this good." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"This is Baxter at his best: a subtle and astute observer of the human." --The New York Review of Books

"Baxter lovingly teases anguish, humor, and heart-rending beauty out of clear, unaffected sentences." --The Washington Post

"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

"This is a marvelous book." --Kansas City Star

"Baxter shines [a] bright light on his characters, so bright that the landscape around them, in almost every story, shimmers like a mirage in extreme heat." --Los Angeles Times

"Baxter is a genius. . . . [Gryphon] keeps us mesmerized to the end. Baxter brings to his masterful stories a quirky slant born of the straight-faced humor of the Midwest." --Jane Ciabattari, Books We Like, NPR

"Baxter's writing is spare, but, like a flash of cat eyes in the night, well-crafted images and wit flit onto the pages." --Providence Journal

"Baxter is always engaged in a kind of chemistry experiment, closely monitoring what will ensue when two or more disparate elements are--often impulsively--combined. The results, always complex, can be surprising: and, like Miss Ferenczi in 'Gryphon, ' they can bring us wonders we had not known we might see." --The New York Review of Books

"Baxter is a writer who plainly enjoys writing, who revels in it, which is rarer than you might think--not the enjoyment, necessarily, but the palpability of the pleasure. . . . Keen and playful." --The Boston Globe

"What a treasure this volume is! . . . Dazzles us with the full brilliance of this writer's vision." --Andrea Barrett, author of The Air We Breathe

"Elegant. . . . Baxter is a melancholy expert craftsman." --The New Yorker

"[Baxter] truly excels at the short form. He observes Chekhov's admonition not to bore people by telling them everything. And yet his delicately carved slices of life contain a surprising amount of detail and depth." --The Miami Herald

"There is both humor and truth in both the miniscule and the grand in Baxter's writing, which makes this book as memorable as his work always is." --Time Out Chicago

"Baxter's constructs are of the muscular, straight-no-chaser variety that you might expect from Hemingway. . . . Never strikes a false note." --Time Out New York

"Further cements [Baxter's] reputation as a master chronicler of the Midwest." --The Christian Science Monitor

"A feast of affecting encounters." --Parade Magazine

"Like those of other masters of the form, Baxter's short stories don't seem abbreviated at all; he manages to suggest the complexity of an entire life within a few pages. . . . Gryphon is a fine introduction for Baxter novices and an exciting addition for connoisseurs." --The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

"Baxter's pilgrim's journeys and tragicomic tales plumb the depths of psychology and faith. . . . Baxter exemplifies how entertainment and enlightenment come together in good fiction." --Asheville Citizen-Times

"Baxter is a subtle and sophisticated writer, and each of these stories merits multiple readings. . . . For those unfamiliar with this great writer, I can't think of a better introduction than this book." --Devon Shepherd, MostlyFiction.com

"Baxter is our modern short story master because he knows how to dig at a particularly Midwestern brand of human frailty. . . . His stories quietly enter the reader's subconscious and reverberate." --Austin American-Statesman