5701 Broad Branch Rd NW, Washington, DC 20015, United States
Ann Beattie attended the Lafayette Elementary School.
3950 Chesapeake St NW, Washington, DC 20016, United States
Ann Beattie attended Woodrow Wilson High School.
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States
Ann Beattie holds a master's degree from the University of Connecticut.
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC, United States
Ann Beattie holds an undergraduate degree from the American University.
Ann Beattie
Beattie in 1986.
Beattie and her husband Lincoln Perry.
Beattie photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, October 1982.
5701 Broad Branch Rd NW, Washington, DC 20015, United States
Ann Beattie attended the Lafayette Elementary School.
3950 Chesapeake St NW, Washington, DC 20016, United States
Ann Beattie attended Woodrow Wilson High School.
4400 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington, DC, United States
Ann Beattie holds an undergraduate degree from the American University.
University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269, United States
Ann Beattie holds a master's degree from the University of Connecticut.
Beattie's husband Lincoln Perry.
Beattie's ex-husband David Gates.
(This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend S...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Chilly-Scenes-Winter-Vintage-Contemporaries-ebook/dp/B004JHYSEO/?tag=2022091-20
1976
(Haunting and disturbingly powerful, these stories establi...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Distortions-Vintage-Contemporaries-Ann-Beattie-ebook/dp/B004JHYK38/?tag=2022091-20
1976
(An unsettling novel that traces the faltering orbits of t...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Falling-Place-Vintage-Contemporaries-Beattie-ebook/dp/B004JHYRU4/?tag=2022091-20
1981
(In The Burning House, Beattie's characters go from dealin...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Burning-House-Vintage-Contemporaries-Beattie-ebook/dp/B004JHYK7E/?tag=2022091-20
1982
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Always-Ann-Beattie/dp/0394744187/?tag=2022091-20
1986
(These stories show the full range of Ann Beattie's talent...)
These stories show the full range of Ann Beattie's talent with "Where You'll Find Me", "Heaven on a Summer Night", "Times", and "In the White Night".
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Youll-Find-Other-Stories/dp/0020165609/?tag=2022091-20
1986
(These fifteen stories by Ann Beattie garnered universal c...)
These 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.
https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Surprises-Ann-Beattie/dp/0679731938/?tag=2022091-20
1991
https://www.amazon.com/Another-You-Ann-Beattie/dp/B002JHC38O/?tag=2022091-20
1995
(Thirty-six stories - eight appearing in a book for the fi...)
Thirty-six stories - eight appearing in a book for the first time and a generous selection from her earlier collections - give us Ann Beattie at stunning mid-career. Emotionally complex, edgy, and funny, the stories encompass a huge range of tone and feeling. The wife of a couple who have lost a child comforts her husband with an amazing act of tenderness. A man who's been shifting from place to place, always finding the same kind of people - sometimes the same people in various configurations - tries to locate himself in the universe. An intricate dance of adultery brings down a marriage. A housekeeper experiences a startling epiphany while looking into her freezer one hot summer night. The long, humorous roll of a couple's "four-night fight" finally explodes into happiness. Beattie has often been called the chronicler of her generation, and these stories capture perfectly the moods and actions of our world since the seventies: people on the move, living in group houses, smoking too much dope; people settling down, splitting up, coming to terms. Margaret Atwood said of a previous collection that "a new Beattie is almost 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." The new stories have the same power. A family secret is revealed in a strange and puzzling act that becomes understood only many years later. In an AIDS ward, certain questions take on special significance. A hostile eight-year-old and his father's live-in girlfriend move in fits and starts toward détente. In prose by turns laserlike and lyrical, these memorable, evocative stories authentically recall the details and feelings of their time. But the truths revealed are - as in all fiction of the first rank - timeless.
https://www.amazon.com/Park-City-Selected-Stories-Contemporaries-ebook/dp/B0104EOH82/?tag=2022091-20
1998
(We open this novel to a woman's account of her brother's ...)
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."
https://www.amazon.com/Doctors-House-Novel-Ann-Beattie-ebook/dp/B000FC0NJQ/?tag=2022091-20
2002
(Ann Beattie arrived in New York young, observant and cele...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Walks-Men-Fiction-Ann-Beattie-ebook/dp/B003L786M8/?tag=2022091-20
2010
https://www.amazon.com/New-Yorker-Stories-Ann-Beattie/dp/143916875X/?tag=2022091-20
2011
(The State We’re In is about how we live in the places we ...)
The State We’re In is about how we live in the places we have chosen - or been chosen by. It’s about the stories we tell our families, our friends, and ourselves, the truths we may or may not see, how our affinities unite or repel us, and where we look for love. Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We’re In is about more than geographical location. Some characters have arrived in Maine by accident, others are trying to escape. The collection is woven around Jocelyn, a wry, disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn’s, sometimes challenging, sometimes embellishing her view. The State We’re In explores, through women’s voices, the unexpected moments and glancing epiphanies of daily life.
https://www.amazon.com/State-Were-Maine-Stories-ebook/dp/B00P42WN18/?tag=2022091-20
2015
(In The Accomplished Guest, people pay visits or receive v...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Accomplished-Guest-Stories-Ann-Beattie-ebook/dp/B01MFETM7M/?tag=2022091-20
2017
(At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the hono...)
At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the honor society led by Pierre LaVerdere, an enigmatic, brilliant, yet perverse, teacher who instructs his students not only about how to reason, but how to prevaricate. As the years go by, LaVerdere's covert and overt instruction lingers in his students' lives as they seek some sense of purpose or meaning. When Ben feels the pace of his life accelerating and views his intimate relationships as less and less fulfilling, there seems to be a subtext he's not able to access. And what, really, did Bailey Academy teach him? While relationships with his stepmother and sister improve, and a move to upstate New York offers respite from his anxiety about love and work, LaVerdere's reappearance in his life disturbs his equilibrium. Everything he once thought he knew about his teacher - and himself - is called into question.
https://www.amazon.com/Wonderful-Stroke-Luck-Novel/dp/0525557342/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Ann Beattie was born in Washington, D.C. on September 8, 1947, she is the only child of Charlotte Crosby Beattie and James A. Beattie. She grew up in Chevy Chase, Washington, D.C. Her father was a grants management specialist for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
Ann Beattie attended Lafayette Elementary School and Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington DC. She holds an undergraduate degree from the American University and a master's degree from the University of Connecticut. She began, but did not complete, work on her Ph.D.
Beattie gained attention in the early 1970s with short stories published in The Western Humanities Review, Ninth Letter, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker. In 1976, she published her first book of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, which was later made into a film.
Beattie's style has evolved over the years. In 1998, she published Park City, a collection of old and new short stories.
Beattie has taught at Harvard College and the University of Connecticut and was for a long time associated with the University of Virginia, where she was first appointed as a part-time lecturer in 1980. She later became Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing in 2000 and remained at the University of Virginia until 2013, when she resigned over disappointment at the direction in which the university was heading. In 2005 she was selected as a winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story, in recognition of her outstanding achievement in that genre. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
Other collections of her stories include Secrets and Surprises (1978), The Burning House (1982), Where You’ll Find Me, and Other Stories (1986), Park City (1998), Perfect Recall (2001), Follies (2005), The State We’re In Maine Stories (2015), and The Accomplished Guest (2017), all of which chronicle the vagaries of human attempts at communication and connection. Other novels include Falling in Place (1980) and Picturing Will (1989). Another You (1995) tells the story of a cynical English professor and his adulterous wife, and My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) is an exploration of the relationship between a young woman in a dead-end marriage and a manipulative aspiring actress. The Doctor’s House (2002) portrays the impact of a despicable father and an alcoholic mother on their adult children. In the unconventional novel Mrs. Nixon (2011), Beattie imagined the life of first lady Pat Nixon and also discussed the art of writing. Her other works include the children’s book Spectacles (1985), which deals with the supernatural, and Alex Katz (1987), a collection of essays in art criticism.
In Beattie's new novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, she casts her jaundiced eyes on a new generation - older millennials.
Beattie's first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), was adapted as a film alternatively titled Chilly Scenes of Winter or Head Over Heels in 1979 by Joan Micklin Silver, starring John Heard, Mary Beth Hurt, and Peter Riegert. The first version was not well received by audiences, though upon its re-release in 1982, with a new title and ending to match that in the book, the movie was successful, and is now considered a cult classic.
(At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the hono...)
2019(This is the story of a love-smitten Charles; his friend S...)
1976(These fifteen stories by Ann Beattie garnered universal c...)
1991(Haunting and disturbingly powerful, these stories establi...)
1976(An unsettling novel that traces the faltering orbits of t...)
1981(Ann Beattie arrived in New York young, observant and cele...)
2010(In The Accomplished Guest, people pay visits or receive v...)
2017(Thirty-six stories - eight appearing in a book for the fi...)
1998(We open this novel to a woman's account of her brother's ...)
2002(These stories show the full range of Ann Beattie's talent...)
1986(In The Burning House, Beattie's characters go from dealin...)
1982(The State We’re In is about how we live in the places we ...)
2015Though Beattie taught for several years (and even went to graduate school herself), she remains ambivalent about the benefits of university writing programs. By her own admission, she values education but does not always see a clear correlation between school and the eventual growth and development of a young writer.
Quotations:
"People who were dying: their minds always raced past whatever was being said, and still the pain went faster, leapfrogging ahead."
"The admiration of another writer’s work is almost in inverse proportion to similarities in style."
"Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson."
Ann Beattie has said that she developed an identity as an “adult-child” who, although dependable and mature, continued to surround herself with toys and called her writing a playtime activity. She has also suggested that as a teenager she suffered from undiagnosed clinical depression.
In 1972 Beattie got married to David Gates, a writer for Newsweek and a singer. Together they had one son and divorced in 1980. In 1985, she met the painter Lincoln Perry, and they married in 1998.
