The Accomplished Guest: Stories
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
A magnificent collection from award-winning author Ann Beattie—"profoundly intriguing and unsettling stories that abound in delectably witty and furious inner monologues, barbed dialogue, ludicrous predicaments, many faceted heartaches, and abrupt upswellings of affection, even love...always on point, funny, and poignant" (Booklist, starred review).
Ann Beattie's "seamless combination of biting wit and mordant humor, precise irony, and consummate cool" is on full display in this astutely observed collection set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, that explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging. In The Accomplished Guest, people pay visits or receive visitors, travel to see old friends, and experience the joys and tolls of hosting company (and of being hosted). In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes.
"Ann Beattie slips into a short story as flawlessly as Audrey Hepburn wore a Givenchy gown" (Oprah Daily), and the pieces in The Accomplished Guest—featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections—are marked by an undercurrent of loss and an unexpected element of violence, with Beattie's signature mordant humor woven throughout. Some guests provide welcome diversions, others are uninvited interruptions, all are indelibly drawn.
Beattie "punctures her characters' pretensions and jadedness with an economy and effortless dialogue that writers have been trying to emulate for three decades" (The New York Times Book Review). The Accomplished Guest is fresh, funny, and overwhelmingly "brilliant at furnishing the precise level of niggling complexity that is tragicomically real" (San Francisco Chronicle).
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Ann Beattie. (2017). The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Scribner.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Ann Beattie. 2017. The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Scribner.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Ann Beattie, The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Scribner, 2017.
MLA Citation (style guide)Ann Beattie. The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Scribner, 2017.
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- bioText: Ann Beattie has been included in five O. Henry Award Collections, in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The former Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, she is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine, Virginia, and Florida.
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- * A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year
A magnificent collection from award-winning author Ann Beattie—"profoundly intriguing and unsettling stories that abound in delectably witty and furious inner monologues, barbed dialogue, ludicrous predicaments, many faceted heartaches, and abrupt upswellings of affection, even love...always on point, funny, and poignant" (Booklist, starred review).
Ann Beattie's "seamless combination of biting wit and mordant humor, precise irony, and consummate cool" is on full display in this astutely observed collection set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, that explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging. In The Accomplished Guest, people pay visits or receive visitors, travel to see old friends, and experience the joys and tolls of hosting company (and of being hosted). In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes.
"Ann Beattie slips into a short story as flawlessly as Audrey Hepburn wore a Givenchy gown" (Oprah Daily), and the pieces in The Accomplished Guest—featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections—are marked by an undercurrent of loss and an unexpected element of violence, with Beattie's signature mordant humor woven throughout. Some guests provide welcome diversions, others are uninvited interruptions, all are indelibly drawn.
Beattie "punctures her characters' pretensions and jadedness with an economy and effortless dialogue that writers have been trying to emulate for three decades" (The New York Times Book Review). The Accomplished Guest is fresh, funny, and overwhelmingly "brilliant at furnishing the precise level of niggling complexity that is tragicomically real" (San Francisco Chronicle). - reviews
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April 24, 2017
Growing old isn’t easy, as the aging intellectuals of Beattie’s latest story collection demonstrate. These 13 wry, chatty, seemingly random stories show disaffected husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children, professors and students in their 60s, 70s, and 80s at unsociable moments connected with social gatherings. In “The Indian Uprising,” once-promising poet Maude lunches at a Washington, D.C., restaurant with her former poetry professor. He has heart trouble and diabetes, can barely walk, and faces dialysis, but it is Maude who, after running into her ex-husband, faints. “For the Best” follows former model Gerald to a New York City Christmas party where he expects to see his ex-wife. She doesn’t appear until after he leaves the party, in the lobby of the hosts’ apartment building, when she jumps out, very drunk, from behind a Christmas tree. “The Astonished Woodchopper” describes resentments surfacing at a wedding via an argument about who will go to the airport to pick up the bride’s son. How childishly grown-ups can behave is made disturbingly clear in “The Debt,” about friends from college days extracting a costly revenge. Women sharing confidences are interrupted by a hold-up man in “The Gypsy Chooses the Whatever Card.” A sisterly reunion unravels in “Other People’s Birthdays.” Set in Maine, Charlottesville, East Coast cities, and Key West, Beattie’s stories capture the perplexity of people, lost in a world of terrorists and Kindles, as they make their way down what Beattie calls “the river of life’s confusion.”
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April 1, 2017
The John Cheever of her generation, Beattie (The State We're In: Maine Stories, 2015, etc.) has long chronicled the emotional foibles of upper-middle-class WASPs with sharply chiseled wit; in these 13 new stories, travel or a visit of some sort is the common thread, mortality the common theme.The settings are along the East Coast with an emphasis on favorite Beattie locales Key West and Maine. Her characters, even those who have fallen in status, are well-educated and of nominally liberal political persuasion. While elderly characters predominate, the middle-aged and younger face their own regrets. In "Anecdotes," elderly, self-centered Lucia's story of passion shocks her daughter Christine's friend Anna into mitigating pain she and Christine may have caused a shared lover's wife years earlier. In "Other People's Birthdays," 40-something Lawry visits her parents and sister Bett for Bett's birthday and witnesses the burden her parents carry in managing the mentally ill Bett's care. In two stories, young women travel to visit older men they admire--a former professor in the case of "The Indian Uprising"; in "The Cloud," a beloved uncle--only to realize the men are privately confronting fatal illnesses and are beyond the women's help. Another professor hosting former students fears he's dying in "Company." Eighty-year-old Gerald, attending a Manhattan Christmas party in "For the Best," and wheelchair-bound Alva, attending a Key West Christmas party in "Lady Neptune," both feel perplexed that life has passed them by. But the unnamed 80-year-old narrator of "The Gypsy Chooses the Whatever Card" performs a good deed for a younger woman and is rewarded with moments of unexpected excitement. In the charming "Hoodie in Xanadu," an elderly Key West widow forms an unexpected partnership with her agoraphobic neighbor, who has transformed his living room into a secret Xanadu. The middle-aged former frat brothers in "The Debt," perhaps the volume's darkest story, confront how "debased" their lives have become during a trip to Key West that ends in tawdry violence. Despite flickers of optimism, this is a somber collection pondering mortality, fate, and the unknowability of others.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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February 1, 2017
Here's Beattie's 11th story collection, following 2015's The State We're In: Maine Stories. Dealing with friendship, aging, and mortality, the pieces are often occasioned by visits, whether for a birthday, wedding, or reunion, and Beattie will no doubt explore the particular pleasures and travails of being either guest or host with scalpel-like precision.
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Ann Beattie's "seamless combination of biting wit and mordant humor, precise irony, and consummate cool" is on full display in this astutely observed collection set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, that explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging. In The Accomplished Guest, people pay visits or receive visitors, travel to see old friends, and experience the joys and tolls of hosting company (and of being hosted). In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a... - sortTitle
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