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

"This is a dangerous book. Pick it up and read a few pages and you won't want to put it down. Cornelia Nixon has a rare and delicate feeling for this world, and it's on exquisite display in Angels Go Naked. A wonderful book."

Margaret Rose is a talented but nervous violinist given to bouts of stage fright and unrequited love; Webster Hale is a biologist,who, on principle, refuses to kill animals in order to study them. In Angels Go Naked, a novel-in-stories,Cornelia Nixon, a writer whose gifts are apparent on every page, follows this vexed love story and the collision course that they call their life together. Margy learns too young about loss and guilt. Webster changes his name and tries to become like the Indian ancestors he feels he must have, somewhere, in the family tree. Against all odds,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 course of their unhappiness, but one in which their connection is never in doubt, is the story of this sad, funny, moving, and enormously compelling novel of contemporary love and loss.

The Women Come and Go

A Solo Performance

Season of Sensuality

By the Shining Big Sea Waters

After the Beep

When a Miwok Takes a Wife

Flight

Last of the Genuine Castrati

Risk

Harbor

Canary in the Mine

Acknowledgments