Download or read book Conversations with Ann Beattie written by Dawn Trouard and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2007 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected interviews with the quintessential New Yorker writer, author of such books as The Doctor's House, Follies, and Falling in Place
Download or read book A Wonderful Stroke of Luck written by Ann Beattie and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Good Housekeeping Best Book of the Year "Every sentence shines with wit, originality, and sharp observations." --The Boston Globe A razor-sharp, deeply felt novel about the complicated relationship between a charismatic teacher and his students, and the secrets we keep from those we love 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. Written by one of our most iconic writers, known for casting a cold eye on her generation's ambivalence and sometimes mistaken ambition, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck is a keenly observed psychological study of a man who alternates between careful driving and hazardous risk taking, as he struggles to incorporate his past into the vertiginous present.
Download or read book The Accomplished Guest written by Ann Beattie and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: * 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).
Download or read book The New Yorker Stories written by Ann Beattie and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here is the complete collection of the author's stories previously published in "The New Yorker" between the years 1974-2006.
Download or read book The State We re In written by Adele Parks and published by Headline Review. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the odds that the stranger sitting next to you on a plane is destined to change your life? Especially when they appear to be your opposite in every way... The perfect read for fans of Ruth Jones, Jane Green and Sheila O'Flanagan, from the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of Just My Luck. Don't miss Adele's gripping new novel, the Sunday Times bestseller Both of You, out now! Acclaim for Adele's compelling, twisty and acutely observed novels: 'Tightly plotted, brilliantly conceived and totally gripping' Lisa Jewell 'Twisty, unputdownable and utterly engrossing' Jenny Colgan 'Brilliant storyline, great characters, very clever, loved it!' B A Paris 'Addictive and perceptive' Lucy Atkins Jo is a hopeless romantic. Worried she let her soulmate slip away, she's chasing her past all the way to Chicago to break up her ex-fiancé's wedding. Dean is a resolute cynic. After a brief (but not brief enough) trip to London, he's returning to Chicago, where he moved to escape his dysfunctional past. In the time it takes to fly from London to Chicago, each finds something in the other that they didn't even realise they needed. But it's only when they get off the plane that their true journey begins... What readers are saying about The State We're In: 'This book is full of surprises and twists that keep you guessing until the end. It is one of those books that I was absolutely devastated to have finished' 'You will laugh, you may cry, but on the whole it is an extremely heart-warming tale that delivers a generous dose of optimism' More praise for Adele Parks: Dark, funny and observant' Cosmopolitan 'Guaranteed to keep you hooked until the end' She magazine 'Deliciously down to earth' The Times 'Wonderfully absorbing' Stylist 'Will captivate you from the first page' Closer
Download or read book Mrs Nixon written by Ann Beattie and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biografisk roman. A literary assessment of the former First Lady from the perspective of a short story master draws on a wealth of sources to reconstruct her worldview, covering her early experiences as a community theater actress and her marriage to the thirty-seventh president
Download or read book Chilly Scenes of Winter written by Ann Beattie and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Walks With Men written by Ann Beattie and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-08 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author Ann Beattie comes an intense, knockout novella that perfectly captures a time and a place—New York in the '80s. 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.
Download or read book Shoplifting from American Apparel written by Tao Lin and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2009-09-15 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A funny autobiographical tale about growing up in the digital age, from a groundbreaking author whose writing is “reminiscent of early Douglas Coupland, or early Bret Easton Ellis” (The Guardian) This autobiographical novella is described by the author as “a shoplifting book about vague relationships,” and “an ultimately life-affirming book about how the unidirectional nature of time renders everything beautiful and sad.” From VIP rooms in hip New York City clubs to central booking in Chinatown, from New York University’s Bobst Library to a bus in someone’s backyard in a Floridian college town, from Bret Easton Ellis to Lorrie Moore, and from Moby to Schumann, Shoplifting from American Apparel explores class, culture, and the arts in all their American forms through the funny, journalistic, and existentially-minded narrative of someone trying to both “not be a bad person” and “find some kind of happiness or something.” “Tao's writing . . . has the force of the real.” —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka School
Download or read book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down written by Anne Fadiman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.
Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 2014 written by Jennifer Egan and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents twenty of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
Download or read book Vera written by Carol Edgarian and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Carol Edgarian delivers “an all-encompassing and enthralling” (Oprah Daily) novel featuring an unforgettable heroine coming of age in the aftermath of catastrophe, and her quest for love and reinvention. Meet Vera Johnson, fifteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of Rose, notorious proprietor of San Francisco’s most legendary bordello. Vera has grown up straddling two worlds—the madam’s alluring sphere, replete with tickets to the opera, surly henchmen, and scant morality, and the quiet domestic life of the family paid to raise her. On the morning of the great quake, Vera’s worlds collide. As the city burns and looters vie with the injured, orphaned, and starving, Vera and her guileless sister, Pie, are cast adrift. Disregarding societal norms and prejudices, Vera begins to imagine a new kind of life. She collaborates with Tan, her former rival, and forges an unlikely family of survivors, navigating through the disaster together. “A character-driven novel about family, power, and loyalty, (San Francisco Chronicle), Vera brings to life legendary characters—tenor Enrico Caruso, indicted mayor Eugene Schmitz and boss Abe Ruef, tabloid celebrity Alma Spreckels. This “brilliantly conceived and beautifully realized” (Booklist, starred review) tale of improbable outcomes and alliances takes hold from the first page, with remarkable scenes of devastation, renewal, and joy. Vera celebrates the audacious fortitude of its young heroine, who discovers an unexpected strength in unprecedented times.
Download or read book The Search For Anne Perry written by Joanne Drayton and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-10-09 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until 1994, the world knew Anne Perry as the writer of bestselling crime fiction at the peak of her writing career. But following the release of Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures, about the sensational 1954 Parker-Hulme murders, came the shocking revelation that Anne Perry began life as Juliet Hulme, the teenager jointly convicted of murdering her friend’s mother. Life would never be the same for Perry. That a convicted murderer had gone on to become a celebrated crime writer with worldwide sales of over 25 million books was tantalizing enough. But with careful analysis of her writing reveals that these were more than simple crime stories; spiritual and philosophical complexities thread their way through Anne Perry’s works. Was Perry, in fact, revealing more about herself in the characters she was creating? Acclaimed biographer Joanne Drayton takes on the challenge of exploring Perry’s writing to uncover her world view and compulsion to write. The famously private Perry agreed to be comprehensively interviewed for the book and has allowed Drayton unparalleled access to her friends, relatives, colleagues and archives.
Download or read book Burning House written by Ann Beattie and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Secrets Surprises written by Ann Beattie and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-09-29 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Falling in Place written by Ann Beattie and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Conversations with Billy Collins written by John Cusatis and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2022-07-27 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy Collins “puts the ‘fun’ back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. Known for what he has called “hospitable” poems, which deftly blend wit and erudition, Collins (b. 1941) is a poet of nearly unprecedented popularity. His work is also critically esteemed and well represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. An English professor for five decades, Collins was fifty-seven when his poetry began gathering considerable international attention. Conversations with Billy Collins chronicles the poet’s career beginning with his 1998 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which exponentially expanded his readership, three years prior to his being named United States Poet Laureate. Other interviewers range from George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, to Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Henry Taylor to a Presbyterian pastor, a physics professor, and a class of AP English Literature students. Over the course of the twenty-one interviews included in the volume, Collins discusses such topics as discovering his persona, that consistently affable voice that narrates his often wildly imaginative poems; why poetry is so loved by children but often met with anxiety by high school students; and his experience composing a poem to be recited during a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that occurred during his tenure as poet laureate. He also explores his love of jazz, his distaste for gratuitously difficult poetry and autobiographical poems, and his beguiling invention of a mock poetic form: the paradelle. Irreverent, incisive, and deeply life-affirming—like his twelve volumes of poetry—these interviews, gathered for the first time in one volume, will edify and entertain readers in the way his sold-out readings have done for the past quarter century.
