Angels Go Naked A Novel

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.

Cornelia Nixon is the author of Angels Go Naked, Now You See It, and Jarrettsville, as well as a book of literary criticism. She has won two O. Henry Awards (one of them the First Prize in 1995), two Pushcart Prizes, a Nelson Algren Prize, and the Carl Sandburg Award for Fiction. She lives half the year in Berkeley, California, and half on an island in Puget Sound, Washington.