by Charles Baxter (Pantheon; $27.95)

Dazed men and women, wounded by failing relationships and other traumas, wander through the Midwest in these twenty-three new and selected stories. Baxter describes the trials of his characters through elegant bursts of plot: a couple grieving for a lost child attempt to break out of their unhappiness by taking a trip to the D. H. Lawrence shrine in Taos; a man agrees to dispose of an acquaintance’s gun but impulsively decides to keep it. The stories return again and again to icy landscapes, most movingly and economically in “Snow,” in which the narrator’s visit to see a car frozen under a lake provokes an overview of his brother’s girlfriend’s future. Whether surveying a loving but prickly mother-son relationship strained by a night-school classroom visit or a drunken grad student’s hapless journey to pick up his stranded fiancée on a snowy night, Baxter is a melancholy expert craftsman. ♦