Ann Beattie – författare

Picturing Will, the widely acclaimed new novel by Ann Beattie, unravels the complexities of a postmodern family. There''s Will, a curious five-year-old who listens to the heartbeat of a plant through his toy stethoscope; Jody, his mother, a photographer poised on the threshold of celebrity; Mel, Jody''s perfect -- perhaps too perfect -- lover; and Wayne, the rather who left Will without warning and now sees his infrequent visits as a crimp in his bedhopping. Beattie shows us how these lives intersect, attract, and repel one another with dazzling shifts and moments of heartbreaking directness.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The now-classic, utterly unique voice of Ann Beattie is so dry it throws off sparks, her eye endowed with the emotional equivalent of X-ray vision. Her characters are young men and women discovering what it means to be a grown-up in a country that promised them they''d stay young forever. And here, in shapely, penetrating stories, Beattie confirms why she is one of the most widely imitated -- yet surely inimitable -- literary stylists of her generation.In The Burning House, Beattie''s characters go from dealing drugs to taking care of a bereaved friend. They watch their marriages fail not with a bang but with a wisecrack. And afterward, they may find themselves trading confidences with their spouses'' new lovers. The Burning House proves that Beattie has no peer when it comes to revealing the hidden shapes of our relationships, or the depths of tenderness, grief, and anger that lie beneath the surfaces of our daily lives.From the Trade Paperback edition.

An unsettling novel that traces the faltering orbits of the members of one family from a hidden love triangle to the ten-year-old son whose problem may pull everyone down.From the Trade Paperback edition.

These fifteen stories by Ann Beattie garnered universal critical acclaim on their first publication, earning Beattie the reputation as the most celebrated new voice in American fiction. Today these stories -- "A Vintage Thunderbird;" "The Lawn Party, " " La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans," to name a few -- seem even more powerful, and are read and studied as classics of the short-story form. Spare and elegant, yet charged with feeling and with the tension of things their characters cannot say, they are masterly portraits of improvised lives.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A master chronicler of our life and times." —Newsday"A very funny book. . . . If Jane Austen had been crossed with Oscar Wilde and re-crossed with the early Evelyn Waugh, and the result plonked down among the semi-beautiful people of late 20th-century media-fringe America . . . the outcome might have been something like this." —Margaret Atwood"Ferociously funny." —The Los Angeles Times"Beattie''s new novel, her third, is a gratifying surprise. Love Always will be welcomed by the large and loyal Beattie readership, but there is much that recommends it to the previously unconverted." —Harper''s Bazaar"Beattie''s most comic—indeed her first satiric—work to date. . . . Much of the book''s authenticity derives from the accretion of felt detail—a Beattie trademark. She captures 1984 Vermont with right-on references to Cyndi Lauper, Horchow catalogs, and ''pre-Cabbage Patch'' Coleco." —The Christian Science Monitor

A collection of short fiction, twelve works in all, including two never-before-published novellas. Here are disconnected marriages and uneasy reunions, nostalgic reminiscences and sudden epiphanies--a remarkable and moving collage of contemporary lives.From the Trade Paperback edition.

To her latest novel, Beattie brings the same documentary accuracy and Chekhovian wit and tenderness that have made her one of the most acclaimed portraitists of contemporary American life. Marshall Lockard, a professor at the local college, is contemplating adultery, unaware that his wife is already committing it.From the Trade Paperback edition.

This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend Sam, the Phi Beta Kappa and former coat salesman; and Charles'' mother, who spends a lot of time in the bathtub feeling depressed.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Haunting and disturbingly powerful, these stories established Ann Beattie as the most celebrated new voice in American fiction and an absolute master of the short-story form. Beattie captures perfectly the profound longings that came to define an entire generation with insight, compassion, and humor.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A razor-sharp, deeply felt new novel about the complicated relationship between a charismatic teacher and his students, and the secrets we keep from those we loveAs a member of the Honor Society at Bailey Academy, one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country, Ben falls under the tutelage of Pierre LaVerdere, a brilliant, enigmatic teacher who instructs his charges on how to discuss current events, how to think about art and literature, and how to form opinions for themselves. Ben develops close friendships with LaVerdere''s other disciples, and as the years go by the legacy of their teacher and his words remain strong. As Ben moves on, first to college and then to the turbulence of post-grad life in New York City, he comes to feel the pace of his life accelerating, his relationships a jumble, and his career plans in a constant state of flux. What did Bailey really teach him?After his father dies, Ben develops a curiously close, yet strained intimacy with his stepmother and tries to salvage what he can of his relationship with his sister. A move upstate offers only temporary respite from his anxieties about work and romance and when LaVerdere returns to Ben''s life, everything Ben once thought he knew about the man--and about himself--is called into question. A twenty-first century comedy of manners, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is a keenly observed work of fiction that shows one of the most iconic writers of our time, once again an astute chronicler of her generation''s ambivalence and sometimes strange ambitions.

Ann Beattie published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1972. Twenty-eight years later, she received the 2000 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She is, as the Washington Post said, "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form." The eleven stories in her new work are peopled by characters coming to terms with the legacies of long-held family myths or confronting altered circumstances, new frailty or sudden, unlikely success. Beattie's ear for language, her complex and subtle wit, and her profound compassion are unparalleled. From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations on illness, art, and servitude, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, PERFECT RECALL comprises Beattie's strongest work in years. It is a riveting commentary on the way we live now by a spectacular prose artist.

A collection of striking short stories filled with memorable characters from award-winning author Ann Beattie.Peopled by characters struggling with second marriages, abandoning artistic aspirations, or coming to terms with the betrayal of their own expectations, this collection of eleven stories from Ann Beattie makes it strikingly clear why she is known as one of "American literature''s most adept explorers and interpreters of the unraveling edges of life" (Miami Herald). From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations about the odd experience of being cared for by those you are meant to serve, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, expressing Clinton''s desire to dine at his house, to two stories in which family myths turn out to be both inaccurate and prescient, Perfect Recall comprises Beattie''s most ambitious and complex work yet.

An impeccable ear for language, an eye for the smallest shifts in the cultural landscape, and a preternatural understanding of motivation and behavior—Ann Beattie''s renowned storytelling abilities are on dazzling display in The Doctor’s House.The story opens on Nina, who should have better things to do than to track her brother Andrew''s sexual escapades. Since her husband''s tragic death, she has become solitary and defensive—and as compulsive about her brother as he is about sex. When the first movement ends, the melody is taken up by their mother. New shadows and new light fall on Nina''s account as painful secrets of life in the house of their father, the doctor''s house, emerge. In the dramatic third movement, Andrew gives us his perspective, and as Beattie takes us into his mind, there is the suggestion that Nina is less innocent and less detached than she maintains. Through subtle shifts, The Doctor''s House chronicles the fictions three people fabricate in order to interpret, to justify, or simply to survive their lives. "Few novelists are more adept at creating fictional atmospheres that eerily simulate the texture of everyday life" (The Washington Post).

From four time O. Henry Award–winning author Ann Beattie, a compellingly tender, acute, and revelatory collection of stories.Ann Beattie''s Follies is a superb novella and collection of stories about adult children, aging parents, and the chance encounters that irrevocably alter lives. Beattie is a masterful observer of domestic relations and the idiosyncratic logic that governs human lives. In Follies, her most resonant collection, she looks at baby boomers in their maturity, sorting out their own lives and struggling with parents who are eccentric, unpredictable, and increasingly dependent. In "Fléchette Follies," a man rear-ends a woman at a stoplight, and the ripple effect of that encounter is vast and catastrophic. In "Apology for a Journey Not Taken," a woman''s road trip is perpetually postponed by the UPS deliveryman who wants to watch TV in her house, by the girl next door who has lost her dog, and by the death of her friend in a freak accident. Impatient in his old age, the protagonist of "That Last Odd Day in L.A." can hardly manage a pleasant word to his own daughter, but he finds a chance for redemption on the last day of a vacation he spends with his niece and nephew. Ann Beattie is at the top of her form in this superb collection, writing with the vividness, compassion, and sometimes morbid wit that have made her one of the most influential writers of her generation.

Lincoln Perry is justly celebrated for his murals and edgy narrative figure paintings, with their saturated palette and multifaceted architectural compositions - Poussin refracted through de Chirico. This beautiful new book showcases his images of Charlottesville, Virginia - many of them multipanel compositions featuring the University of Virginia and its environs - accompanied by an essay and interview by his wife, the writer Ann Beattie. Perry's mural ""The Student's Progress"", which depicts a woman's education and social experience from matriculation through graduation, is familiar to University of Virginia students, faculty, and visitors, but Perry has been painting Charlottesville subjects on and off since 1985, when he first moved to town. From his early explorations of the complex relationships between professors and students, played out against the backdrop of Jefferson's Lawn, through his intriguing depictions of the city's domestic interiors, buildings, and streets, Perry illuminates a different side of a place widely appreciated for its history and natural beauty. ""Charlottesville"", writes Beattie, ""both disturbs and calls to [Perry]: it's a paradoxically comfortable and uncomfortable not-quite-home he has been drawn to many times for reasons he can't easily articulate...I think that Lincoln likes the town's quirkiness and its lack of uniformity. It's also a place that allows him to practice the x-ray vision so many visual people have for underpinnings: the contradictions that can be drawn upon and aesthetically dramatized...The place sparks his imagination, and with his paintbrush, he sparks it, charging the air with a bit of unexpected - but very recognizable - light."" Together, Perry and Beattie give us a view of Charlottesville, of place and artistic production that carries with it the warmth of recognition and the thrill of discovery.

Thirty-six stories--eight appearing in a book for the first time and a generous selection from her earlier collections--give us Ann Beattie at stunning mid-career.Emotionally complex, edgy, and funny, the stories encompass a huge range of tone and feeling. The wife of a couple who have lost a child comforts her husband with an amazing act of tenderness. A man who''s been shifting from place to place, always finding the same kind of people--sometimes the same people in various configurations--tries to locate himself in the universe. An intricate dance of adultery brings down a marriage. A housekeeper experiences a startling epiphany while looking into her freezer one hot summer night. The long, humorous roll of a couple''s "four-night fight" finally explodes into happiness.Beattie has often been called the chronicler of her generation, and these stories capture perfectly the moods and actions of our world since the seventies: people on the move, living in group houses, smoking too much dope; people settling down, splitting up, coming to terms. Margaret Atwood said of a previous collection that "a new Beattie is almost like a fresh bulletin from the front: We snatch it up, eager to know what''s happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no-man''s-land known as interpersonal relations." The new stories have the same power. A family secret is revealed in a strange and puzzling act that becomes understood only many years later. In an AIDS ward, certain questions take on special significance. A hostile eight-year-old and his father''s live-in girlfriend move in fits and starts toward détente.In prose by turns laserlike and lyrical, these memorable, evocative stories authentically recall the details and feelings of their time. But the truths revealed are--as in all fiction of the first rank--timeless.