Ann Beattie

Fresh from Harvard's Class of 1980, Jane embarks on a live-in affair with 40-something writer Neil, a man who shares with her his bizarre rules for living life. By the author of Follies.

Fiction

Walks With Men

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.

Chilly Scenes of Winter

From a multiple prize–winning master of the short form: a stunning collection of brand-new, linked stories that perfectly capture the zeitgeist through the voices of vivid and engaging women from adolescence to old age. “We build worlds for ourselves wherever we go,” writes Ann Beattie. The State We're In, her magnificent new collection of linked stories, is about how we live in the places we have chosen—or been chosen by. It's about the stories we tell our families, our friends, and ourselves, the truths we may or may not see, how our affinities unite or repel us, and where we look for love. Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We're In is about more than geographical location, 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, sometimes embellishing her view. Riveting, witty, sly, idiosyncratic, and bold, these stories describe a state of mind, a manner of being—now. A Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is “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 State We're In is a fearless exploration of contemporary life by a brilliant writer whose fiction startles as it illuminates.

Maine Stories

The State We're In

From a master of the short form, a collection of all the stories Ann Beattie has published in The New Yorker.

The New Yorker Stories

Raymond Carver

Bob Adelman

Tess Gallagher

A poignant portrait of the landscapes and people that would greatly influence Raymond Carver s writing."

The World of Raymond Carver

Carver Country

Now back in print, Ann Beattie's finest short story collection, reissued to accompany the publication of her latest novel, "The Doctor's House." Most of the characters in "Where You'll Find Me" grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, are in their twenties and thirties and embody a curious, yet familiar, fusion of hope and despair. In finely crafted narratives, Beattie writes of women nursing broken hearts, men looking for love, and married couples struggling to stay together.

And Other Stories

Where You'll Find Me

"Set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, this collection of stories explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging"--

Stories

The Accomplished Guest

A man who attended a prestigious New England boarding school has his life turned upside down by the reappearance in his life of an enigmatic and brilliant but difficult former teacher who makes him question everything he knows.

A Wonderful Stroke of Luck

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.

Distortions

"Onlookers is a story collection about people living in the same Southern town whose lives intersect in surprising ways"--

Onlookers

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.

Secrets & Surprises

A five-year-old, his photographer mother, and his prepetually unlucky, philandering father populate this novel about the trials and rewards of both being and raising a child

Picturing Will

Snow

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.

Another You

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.

Falling in Place

New Stories

Follies

Outlet

Lucy Spenser, the Miss Lonelyhearts of a chic counter-cultural magazine, finds her unflappable Vermont life completely upended by her teenaged soap-opera-star niece, Nicole, and her hangers-on

Love Always

A literary assessment of the former First Lady from the perspective of a PEN/Malamud short story master draws on a wealth of sources to reconstruct her worldview, providing coverage of such topics as her early experiences as a community theatre actress, her marriage to the 37th President and the enigmatic aspects of her character.

Ann Beattie

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