The New Yorker : stories / Ann Beattie

Complete collection of the author's stories previously published in The New Yorker, 1974-2006.

Platonic relationship -- Fancy flights -- Wolf dreams -- Dwarf house -- Snakes' shoes -- Vermont -- Downhill -- Wanda's -- Colorado -- Lawn party -- Secrets and surprises -- Weekend -- Tuesday night -- Shifting -- Distant music - Vintage thunderbird -- Cinderella Waltz -- Burning House -- Waiting -- Greenwich time -- Gravity -- Running dreams -- Afloat -- Girl talk -- Like glass -- Desire -- Moving water -- Coney Island -- Television -- Lofty -- One day -- Heaven on a summer night -- Times -- In the white night -- Summer people -- Janus -- Skeletons -- Where you'll find me -- Home to Marie -- Horation's trick -- Second question -- Zalla -- Women of this world -- Last odd day in L.A. -- Find and replace -- Rabbit hole as likely explanation -- Coping stones -- Confidence decoy.

When Ann Beattie began publishing short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-seventies, she emerged with a voice so original, and so uncannily precise and prescient in its assessment of her characters' drift and narcissism, that she was instantly celebrated as a voice of her generation. Her name became an adjective: Beattiesque-- Subtle, wry, and unnerving. She is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family, and also of the myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace. Each Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "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." With an unparalleled gift for dialogue and laser wit, she delivers flash reports on the cultural landscape of her time.