by Charles Baxter (Knopf, $13.95)

Charles Baxter is a consummate short story writer, and this novel moves forward in mini-arcs that read like short stories rather than a single long thread to the denoument. It seems like the right way to tell the story of a long marriage as smart and complicated as Saul and Patsy's, and their strange experiences as urbanites transplanted to Midwestern America. Read it for the gifts of Baxter's perfect sentences, the too-real-for-the-page characters, and an utterly enjoyably different way of doing the novel.