From a writer whose work 'reminds one of how broad and deep and shining a story can be' (Alice Munro), a selection that gathers the best from his four earlier collections as well as seven previously uncollected stories.

However different they are from one another, all of the people in Charles Baxter's stories share a desire - sometimes muted and sometimes fierce - to break through the fragile glass of convention. Take for instance the substitute teacher in the title story: walking into a new classroom, she decides that 'this room needs a tree' and proceeds to draw an outsize tree on the blackboard; then she rewards the students by telling their fortunes using a Tarot deck. And so we are in the territory of Baxter's imagination, where the ordinary and the quotidian bump up against the eerie and the inexplicable, where the lyrical and the metaphysical coexist, and where the events that jolt his characters - whether they are catastrophic or almost imperceptible gestures - lead to equally unexpected, powerful, and moving effects.

William Maxwell once remarked that 'nobody can touch Baxter in the field that he has carved out for himself.' This volume is the clearest articulation yet of Baxter's unique achievement.