The Accomplished Guest

Stories

By: Ann Beattie

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, Jacques Roy

* 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).

One of Our Best Short Story Writers

When I was a recent college graduate working in NY, Ann Beattie's New Yorker stories always made me aspire to THAT kind of life. When I was a graduate student at UVA, stories about Ann Beattie abounded--and were all good--since she was a teacher there every few years. As a middle-aged adult I have met her multiple times. Her personal candor and humor are reflected as much in her personality as in her stories. And so it is really a delight to see the same quick wit and heart in stories about characters of a certain age now that I am of a certain age. And it also must be said that the short story is sooo hard to get right. But she has been doing it right for decades.

It's Ann Beattie, of course it is great

I truly enjoyed everything about this. The writing, the narration, the many and varied themes, and the fact that the quality of Beattie's work never dips.