Wonders of the Invisible World - Hardcover

Ten stories include "Star Baby," "The Crazy Thought," and "The Mail Lady," in which a stroke victim struggles to find a balance between his still-vital mind and a broken body

ries, the author of Jernigan (runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize) and Preston Falls (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) illuminates with unflinching vision and hard-earned compassion a great variety of lives: men and women, young and old, in thrall to--or in flight from--jobs less creative than the echoing past had promised, as their parents, siblings or children die, implode or (perhaps just as bad) flourish. Gates's people know their Hopper, Huysmans and Haggard, their Beckett, Bartoli and Billie Holiday, more confidently than they know their families, friends and lovers.

Yet they're terrifyingly self-aware, and refuse to go gently--even when they're going nowhere fast. The author the New York Times calls "a novelist of the very first order" now stakes a similar claim as a writer of short fiction.

My first thought of the day is: And we are supposedly good people.  (from "Beating")
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