"... writing with a novelist's dynamism, O'Connor resurrects fascinating individuals and tells a many-faceted, intensely affecting, and profoundly revelatory tale of the inciting power of art and the unending need for justice.''

-- Booklist (starred review)  

The spellbinding story, part fairy tale, part suspense, of Gustav Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the most emblematic portraits of its time; of the beautiful, seductive Viennese Jewish salon hostess who sat for it; the notorious artist who painted it; the now vanished turn-of-the-century Vienna that shaped it; and the strange twisted fate that befell it.

"This is Baxter at his best: a subtle and astute observer of the human." 

-The New York Review of Books   

A favorite of John, this collection by Charles Baxter is new in paperback this week.

Baxter once described himself as "a Midwestern writer in a postmodern age." At home in a terrain best known for its blandness, one that does not give up its secrets easily, whose residents don't always talk about what's on their mind, and where something out of the quotidian - some stress, the appearance of a stranger, or a knock on the window - may be all that's needed to force what lies underneath to the surface and to disclose a surprising impulse, frustration, or desire. 

Whether friends or strangers, the characters in Baxter's stories share a desire - sometimes muted and sometimes fierce - to break through the fragile glass of convention. In each of the stories we see the delicate tension between what we want to believe and what we need to believe.   

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 story collections Believers, A Relative Stranger, Through the Safety Net, and Harmony of the World. He lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.  

"Hamilton's writing about food is so vivid it could make you half-crazed with hunger, leaving you in front of the open fridge with a cold chicken leg in one hand and the book in the other."

--The Boston Globe

Did you catch this review in The New York Times last week? New York Review of Books "Classics" editions have reissued two novels that have been out of print in the US for decades.

British novelist Elizabeth (Coles) Taylor authored a dozen novels and dozens of short stories before her death in 1975. One of the finest twentieth-century English novelists, she, like her contemporaries Graham Greene, Richard Yates, and Michelangelo Antonioni, was a connoisseur of the modern world's forsaken zones. Her characters are real, people caught out by their own desires and decisions, and they demand our attention. The be-stilled suburban backwaters she sets out to explore shimmer in her books with the punishing clarity of a desert mirage.

A Game of Hide and Seek (Introduction by Caleb Crain):

Harriet and Vesey meet when they are teenagers, and their love is as intense and instantaneous as it is innocent. But they are young. All life still lies ahead. Vesey heads off hopefully to pursue a career as an actor. Harriet marries and has a child, becoming a settled member of suburban society. And then Vesey returns, the worse for wear, and with him the love whose memory they have both sentimentally cherished, and even after so much has happened it cannot be denied. But things are not at all as they used to be. Love, it seems, is hardly designed to survive life.  

Angel (Introduction by Hilary Mantel):

Perhaps every novelist harbors a monster at heart, an irrepressible and utterly irresponsible fantasist, not to mention a born and ingenious liar, without which all her art would go for naught. Angel, at any rate, is the story of such a monster. Angelica Deverell lives above her diligent, drab mother's grocery shop in a dreary turn-of-the-century English neighborhood, but spends her days dreaming of handsome Paradise House, where her aunt is enthroned as a maid. But in Angel's imagination, she is the mistress of the house, a realm of lavish opulence, of evening gowns and peacocks. Then she begins to write popular novels, and this fantasy becomes her life. And now that she has tasted success, Angel has no intention of letting anyone stand in her way-except, perhaps, herself.