In these ten stories, Charles Baxter shows his genius in making his characters' everyday sufferings--and occasional fragile joys--seem utterly unprecedented, even as he reminds us, gently and with a sly comic twist, that everything they feel is only the collateral damage of being human. Whether he is writing about the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need, and pity in a friendship that has gone on a few decades too long, Baxter enchants us with the elegant balance of his prose and the unexpectedness of his insights. Long admired and now once more available in paperback, <b>Harmony of the World</b> is a masterpiece of lucidity and compassion.
