Angels Go Naked

"Wise, magical [stories], galvanized by a kind of sensual thought and an alertness to the ways we love and fail and insist on doing it again and again until we get lucky, until we get it right."

-Frederick Busch Angels Go Naked is the vexed love story of Webster, a microbiologist at Berkeley, Margy, a violinist for the Chicago Symphony, and the collision course they call their life together. Against all probability, they meet, fall in love, and marry. Margy begins to think about having a child, and it is here that Cornelia Nixon most brilliantly captures the troubled but deeply symbiotic union of a wife who says she desperately wants children and a husband who refuses to become a father. The arc of this couple's unhappiness is traced in a funny, sad, and compassionate series of beautifully imagined scenes. As in her celebrated novel Now You See It, Nixon's gifts are apparent on every page. Praise for Now You See It:

Cornelia Nixon is an award-winning writer who "combines Alice Munro's sympathetic understanding of character with Ann Beattie's radar-sharp eye for the dislocations of contemporary culture."

-New York Times