Ann Beattie Books In Order

Novels

Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976)
Falling in Place (1980)
Love Always (1985)
Picturing Will (1990)
Another You (1995)
My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997)
The Doctor’s House (2002)
A Wonderful Stroke of Luck (2019)

Collections

Distortions (1976)
Secrets and Surprises (1978)
The Burning House (1982)
Where You’ll Find Me (1986)
What Was Mine (1991)
Park City (1998)
Perfect Recall (1999)
Follies (2005)
The New Yorker Stories (2010)
The State We’re In (2015)
The Accomplished Guest (2017)

Chapbooks

Jacklighting (1981)
Spectacles (1985)

Novellas

Walks with Men (2010)
Playing to the Bear (2012)
Vermont (2015)

Anthologies edited

American Fiction ’87 (1987)

Non fiction

Alex Katz (1990)
Americana (1992)
With This Ring (1997)
Lincoln Perry’s Charlottesville (2005)
Mrs. Nixon (2011)
Thousand Words (2016)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Chapbooks Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

American Fiction ’87
(1987)

Non fiction Book Covers

Ann Beattie Books Overview

Chilly Scenes of Winter

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.

Falling in Place

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.

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

Picturing Will

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.

Another You

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.

My Life, Starring Dara Falcon

In her latest novel, the author of Another You combines intensely realistic description and an effortless command of mood to examine the treacherous difference between love and fascination between what we know about other people and what we think we know. Dara Falcon is someone other people think they know. Charismatic and theatrical, she has no sooner arrived in a New England town than she is wreaking havoc in the lives of her new friend Jean and her family. As Ann Beattie follows Dara’s antics, she braids subplots and vibrant characters into a work that is compassionate, tartly funny, and teeming with life. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Doctor’s House

An ear for language of the highest order, profound compassion for characters, an eye for the smallest shifts in the cultural landscape, and a preternatural understanding of motivation and behavior Ann Beattie’s renowned storytelling abilities, for which she won the 2000 PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize, are on dazzling display in The Doctor’s House. We open this novel to a woman’s account of her brother’s sexual appetites and his betrayals of his lovers, which he has a need to confess to his sister. Nina, a reclusive copy editor, should have better things to do than to track Andrew’s 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, the brother gives us his perspective, and as Beattie takes us into Andrew’s 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,’ said The Washington Post, ‘are more adept at creating fictional atmospheres that eerily simulate the texture of everyday life.’

Distortions

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.

Secrets and Surprises

‘Powerful and plausible…
Beattie is a remarkable talent.’ Chicago Sun TimesThese 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.’Ann Beattie’s stories are the most perceptive since Salinger’s. They are not just good writing, not just true to life; they have wonder in them and vision.’ Mary Lee Settle’Superb.’ Boston Globe’Talented and sensitive…
works of vivid honesty and insight.’ Washington PostAlso by Ann Beattie, available in Vintage Contemporaries: Chilly Scenes of Winter, Distortions, Falling in Place, Love Always, Picturing Will

The Burning House

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.

Where You’ll Find Me

Hailed by the Washington Post Book World as ‘one of our era’s most vital masters of the short form,’ Ann Beattie offers readers unforgettable glimpses of people coming to terms with the world around them. Most of the characters in Where You’ll Find Me grew up in the 1960s and 1970s; when we meet them they are in their twenties and thirties and embody a curious, yet familiar, fusion of hope and despair. In finely crafted, often surprising narratives, Beattie writes of women nursing broken hearts, men looking for love, and married couples struggling to stay together.

What Was Mine

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.

Park City

For more than twenty five years, Ann Beattie’s short fiction has held a mirror up to America, portraying its awkwardly welded families, its loosely coupled couples, and much uprooted children with acuity, humor, and compassion. This triumphant collection includes thirty six of the finest stories of her career including eight new pieces that have not appeared in a book before. Beattie’s characters embark on stoned cross country odysseys with lovers who may leave them before the engine cools. They comfort each other amid the ashes of failed relationships and in hospital waiting rooms. They try to locate themselves in a world where all the old landmarks have been turned into theme parks. Funny and sorrowful, fiercely compressed yet emotionallyexpansive, Park City is dazzling.

Perfect Recall

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 Book World 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.

Follies

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, winner of four O. Henry prizes, has been called ‘one of our era’s most vital masters of the short form’ The Washington Post Book World. She 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 ‘Fl chette 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.

The New Yorker Stories

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 as*sessment 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 also 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, she delivers flash reports on the cultural landscape of her time. 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.

Walks with Men

Ann Beattie arrived in New York young, observant and celebrated as The New Yorker’s young fiction star in one of the most compelling and creative eras of recent times. So does the protagonist of her intense new novella, Walks with Men. 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 on your head which is best, learn to do cartwheels. Have sex in airplane bathrooms. Wear only raincoats made in England. Neil s certainties, Jane discovers, mask his deceptions. Her true education begins. ‘One of our era s most vital masters of the short form’ The Washington Post, Beattie brilliantly captures a time, a place and a style of engagement. Her voice is original and iconic.

Americana

Novelist Ann Beattie provides the text for this collection of photographs by the well known photographer that features portraits of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, and other American figures.

With This Ring

With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage is a moving and honest look at the institution of marriage. ‘These photographs are a testament to the inherent mystery of how people live and embrace. To the unknowableness of life behind closed doors, yet the titillation of spying because someone seems to have permeated these walls.’ Ann Beattie

Lincoln Perry’s Charlottesville

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 U. Va. 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. Publication made possible by generous support from the W. L. Lyons Brown Jr. Charitable Foundation

Mrs. Nixon

Dazzlingly original, Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon is a riveting exploration of an elusive American icon and of the fiction writer s art. Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon s wife: interchangeable with a Martian, she said. Decades later, she 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 from Life magazine to accounts by Nixon s daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman Diaries and Jonathan Schell s The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon s point of view. Like Stephen King s On Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers a rare glimpse into the imagination of a writer. Beattie, whose fiction Vanity Fair calls irony laced reports from the front line of the baby boomers war with themselves, packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work.