Ann Beattie

"A collection of stories from award-winning author Ann Beattie, featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections. Surprising and revealing, set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, Beattie's astutely observed collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging." --

"As deeply rewarding as her fiction, a selection of Ann Beattie's essays, chosen and introduced by the author. From appreciations of writers, photographers, and other artists, to notes on the craft of writing itself, this is a wide-ranging, and always penetrating collection of writing never before published in book form. Ann Beattie, a master storyteller, has been delighting readers since the publication of her short stories in the 1970s and her first...

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 as "interchangeable with a Martian." But 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 Nicon's...

This novel, framed in a trilogy of voices, is a complex portrait of one family and the fictions a mother, son, and daughter create to navigate their lives.

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 father who left Will without warning and now sees his infrequent visits as a crimp in his bedhopping....

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.

A collection of the author's most recent stories features unnervingly sophisticated young people and older folks striving for wisdom and grace.

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. Neil's certainties, Jane discovers, mask his deceptions. Her true education begins.

This is the story of love-smitten Charles, his friend Sam, and Charles' mother, who spends much of her time in the bathtub feeling depressed.