The New Yorker Stories

Ann Beattie

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781439168752
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439168769
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

The perfect book for new fans and decade-long supporters alike, Ann Beattie: The New Yorker provides readers with a lifetime’s worth of short stories from one of the most original and celebrated voices of her generation.

When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters’ drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Her name became an adjective: Beattiesque.

Subtle, wry, and unnerving, she is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family and of the myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace.

Each 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.”

With an unparalleled gift for dialogue and laser wit, Beattie delivers flash reports on the cultural landscape of her time through character-driven, slice-of-life introspective fiction. Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories is the perfect initiation for readers new to this iconic American writer and a glorious return for those who have known and loved her work for decades.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Flap
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Platonic Relationship
• Fancy Flights
• Wolf Dreams
• Dwarf House
• Snakes’ Shoes
• Vermont
• Downhill
• Wanda’s
• Colorado
• The Lawn Party
• Secrets and Surprises
• Weekend
• Tuesday Night
• Shifting
• Distant Music
• A Vintage Thunderbird
• The Cinderella Waltz
• The Burning House
• Waiting
• Greenwich Time
• Gravity
• Running Dreams
• Afloat
• Girl Talk
• Like Glass
• Desire
• Moving Water
• Coney Island
• Television
• Lofty
• One Day
• Heaven on a Summer Night
• Times
• In the White Night
• Summer People
• Janus
• Skeletons
• Where You’ll Find Me
• Home to Marie
• Horatio’s Trick
• Second Question
• Zalla
• The Women of This World
• That Last Odd Day in L.A.
• Find and Replace
• The Rabbit Hole as Likely Explanation
• Coping Stones
• The Confidence Decoy
• About the Author
• Back Flap
• Back Cover