We look forward to seeing you on your next visit to the library. Find a location near you.

The Accomplished Guest: Stories
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)

Book Cover
Average Rating
5 star
 
(0)
4 star
 
(0)
3 star
 
(0)
2 star
 
(1)
1 star
 
(0)
Published:
Simon & Schuster Audio 2017
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
* 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).
Also in This Series
Formats
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
Works on MP3 Players, PCs, and Macs. Some mobile devices may require an application to be installed.
OverDrive Listen
Need Help?
If you are having problem transferring a title to your device, please fill out this support form or visit the library so we can help you to use our eBooks and eAudio Books.
More Like This
Other Editions and Formats
More Copies In LINK+
Loading LINK+ Copies...
More Details
Format:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen
Edition:
Unabridged
Street Date:
06/13/2017
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781508241645
Reviews from GoodReads
Loading GoodReads Reviews.
Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Ann Beattie. (2017). The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Unabridged Simon & Schuster Audio.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Ann Beattie. 2017. The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Simon & Schuster Audio.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Ann Beattie, The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Simon & Schuster Audio, 2017.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Ann Beattie. The Accomplished Guest: Stories. Unabridged Simon & Schuster Audio, 2017.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
Copy Details
LibraryOwnedAvailable
Shared Digital Collection22
Staff View
Grouped Work ID:
3fbb722f-b7e8-6fee-4a47-f3e5c409a7aa
Go To Grouped Work
Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 17:49:11
Date Updated:
Sep 05, 2023 20:50:51
Last Metadata Check:
Apr 21, 2024 09:22:26
Last Metadata Change:
Feb 08, 2024 17:42:49
Last Availability Check:
Apr 21, 2024 09:22:28
Last Availability Change:
Nov 12, 2023 06:23:53
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
Apr 26, 2024 02:10:38

OverDrive Product Record

images
    • cover:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/5054-1/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img100.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • thumbnail:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/5054-1/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img200.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover150Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/5054-1/F60/F40/36/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img150.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover300Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/5054-1/F60/F40/36/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img400.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
formats
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9781508241645
            • type: 8
            • value: simonandschuster_audio#9781508241645
      • name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
      • id: audiobook-mp3
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9781508241645
            • type: 8
            • value: simonandschuster_audio#9781508241645
      • name: OverDrive Listen
      • id: audiobook-overdrive
edition
Unabridged
mediaType
Audiobook
primaryCreator
    • role: Author
    • name: Ann Beattie
isOwnedByCollections
True
title
The Accomplished Guest
dateAdded
2017-06-08T22:49:00Z
contentDetails
      • href: https://link.overdrive.com?websiteID=141&titleID=3198605
      • type: text/html
      • account:
          • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
          • id: 1151
sortTitle
Accomplished Guest Stories
crossRefId
3198605
subtitle
Stories
id
F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C
starRating
3.3

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain
False
formats
      • duration: 07:11:57
      • fileName: TheAccomplishedGuest_9781508241645_3198605
      • partCount: 7
      • fileSize: 205448054
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9781508241645
            • type: 8
            • value: simonandschuster_audio#9781508241645
      • rights:
            • type: PlayOnPC
            • value: 1
            • type: PlayOnPCCount
            • value: -1
            • type: BurnToCD
            • value: 1
            • type: BurnToCDCount
            • value: -1
            • type: PlayOnPM
            • value: 1
            • type: TransferToSDMI
            • value: 1
            • type: TransferToNonSDMI
            • value: 1
            • type: TransferCount
            • value: -1
            • type: CollaborativePlay
            • value: 0
            • type: PublicPerformance
            • value: 0
            • type: TranscodeToAAC
            • value: 1
      • name: OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
      • isReadAlong: False
      • id: audiobook-mp3
      • onSaleDate: 6/13/2017
      • samples:
            • source: Part 1
            • formatType: audiobook-mp3
            • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/5054-1/3198605-TheAccomplishedGuest.mp3
            • source: Part 1
            • formatType: audiobook-overdrive
            • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=f60f4036-e1b4-4381-8908-ce33080f640c&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
      • duration: 07:07:59
      • fileName: AccomplishedGuestStories-9698
      • partCount: 0
      • fileSize: 205438220
      • identifiers:
            • type: ISBN
            • value: 9781508241645
            • type: 8
            • value: simonandschuster_audio#9781508241645
      • name: OverDrive Listen
      • isReadAlong: False
      • id: audiobook-overdrive
      • onSaleDate: 6/13/2017
      • samples:
            • source: Part 1
            • formatType: audiobook-mp3
            • url: https://excerpts.cdn.overdrive.com/FormatType-425/5054-1/3198605-TheAccomplishedGuest.mp3
            • source: Part 1
            • formatType: audiobook-overdrive
            • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=f60f4036-e1b4-4381-8908-ce33080f640c&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
creators
      • role: Author
      • fileAs: Beattie, Ann
      • 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.
      • name: Ann Beattie
      • role: Narrator
      • fileAs: Zackman, Gabra
      • name: Gabra Zackman
      • role: Narrator
      • fileAs: Roy, Jacques
      • name: Jacques Roy
publishDate
2017-06-13T00:00:00-04:00
edition
Unabridged
isOwnedByCollections
True
title
The Accomplished Guest
fullDescription
* 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
      • premium: True
      • source: AudioFile Magazine
      • content: The 13 short stories in Beattie's latest collection travel up and down the East Coast--from Maine to New York City to Key West. In doing so, they share shrewd observations of unexpected friendships, aging, regrets, and new connections. Jacques Roy and Gabra Zackman narrate their assigned tales with comfortable deliveries that invite the listener into these slices of life. Roy's deliveries are compelling yet detached. He recounts the stories as if making observations about mutual acquaintances, without changing tone, accent, or pacing. Zackman is also conversational but less detached. She subtly distinguishes between characters in conversations, deepening the timbre of her voice when the dialogue requires a male voice. Both narrators deliver Beattie's astute observations and droll humor with a light, inviting touch. N.E.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        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.”

popularity
639
links
    • self:
        • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/f60f4036-e1b4-4381-8908-ce33080f640c/metadata
        • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json
id
f60f4036-e1b4-4381-8908-ce33080f640c
starRating
3.3
images
    • cover:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/5054-1/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img100.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • thumbnail:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/5054-1/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img200.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover150Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/5054-1/F60/F40/36/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img150.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
    • cover300Wide:
        • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/5054-1/F60/F40/36/{F60F4036-E1B4-4381-8908-CE33080F640C}Img400.jpg
        • type: image/jpeg
isPublicPerformanceAllowed
False
languages
      • code: en
      • name: English
subjects
      • value: Fiction
      • value: Literature
      • value: Short Stories
      • value: Humor (Fiction)
publishDateText
06/13/2017
mediaType
Audiobook
shortDescription
* 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...
sortTitle
Accomplished Guest Stories
crossRefId
3198605
subtitle
Stories
publisher
Simon & Schuster Audio
bisacCodes
      • code: FIC016000
      • description: Fiction / Humorous / General
      • code: FIC019000
      • description: Fiction / Literary
      • code: FIC029000
      • description: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)