Ann Beattie
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This is about more than geographical location of Maine, and certainly is not a picture postcard of the coastal state. Some characters have arrived by accident, others are trying to get out. The collection opens, closes, and is interlaced with stories that focus on Jocelyn, a wryly disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn's, sometimes challenging,...
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A dazzling new collection from award-winning author Ann Beattie - featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections. Ann Beattie's first book, Distortions, was published more than forty years ago, but her writing is as fresh, funny, and relevant as ever. He astutely observed new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, aging, and mortality. In The Accomplished Guest, people pay visits or receive...
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The reader travels with Ms. Beattie to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to learn about the legacy of the painter, Grant Wood, and his iconic painting American Gothic; to the famed University of Virginia campus with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry; to Key West, Florida for New Years with writer and translator, Harry Mathews; to a roadside near Boston in a broken-down car with the wheelchair-bound writer Andre Dubus. There are explorations of novels, short...
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At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the honor society led by Pierre LaVerdere, an enigmatic, brilliant, yet perverse, teacher who instructs his students not only about how to reason, but how to prevaricate. As the years go by, LaVerdere's covert and overt instruction lingers in his students' lives as they seek some sense of purpose or meaning. When Ben feels the pace of his life accelerating and views his intimate relationships as less...
9) Mrs. Nixon
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Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon's point of view.
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It is 1980 in New York City, and Jane, a valedictorian fresh out of Harvard, strikes a deal with Neil, an intoxicating writer twenty years her senior. The two quickly become lovers, living together in a Chelsea brownstone, and Neil reveals the rules for a life well lived: If you take food home from a restaurant, don't say it's because you want leftovers for "the dog." Say that you want the bones for "a friend who does autopsies." If you can't stand
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