A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

These eleven stories, along with a masterful novella, mark the triumphant return of David Gates, whom New York magazine anointed "a true heir to both Raymond Carver and John Cheever."

Gates's characters, young or old or neither, are well educated, broadly knowledgeable, often creative and variously accomplished, whether as a doctor or a composer, an academic or a journalist. And every one of them carries a full supply of the human condition: parents in assisted-living--or assisted-dying--facilities, too many or too few people in their families and marriages, the ties that bind a sometimes messy knot, age an implacable foe, impulses pulling them away from comfort into distraction or catastrophe. Terrifyingly self-aware, they refuse to go gently--even when they're going nowhere fast, in settings that range across the metropolitan and suburban Northeast to the countryside upstate and in New England.

Relentlessly inventive, alternatively hilarious and tragic, always moving, this book proves yet again that Gates's stories, as The Boston Globe concluded, "have something for which many fiction writers would make a pact with any sort of devil--utter authenticity."

DAVID GATES lives in Missoula, where he teaches at the University of Montana, and in Granville, New York, where he is associated with the Bennington Writing Seminars. A former Guggenheim Fellow, for many years he was a writer and editor at Newsweek, where he specialized in music and books.