Synopses & Reviews
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. <BR>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.
Review:
"In this her third collection of short stories in six years, the prolific Ann Beattie opens contemporary relationships to their enervated hearts, pulling forth unflinchingly her Amandas, Bens, Nicks, and Annies to love and lose. Actually, not all lose; some merely suffer. And all of them wait. The difficulty with stories in a collection such as this is that their terrains overlap. One feels, in fact, that Beattie characters all live about 30 feet psychically from one another, whether forlorn in Vermont, walking dogs in New York City, or down on a Virginia farm. Beattie's stories, however, are not rooms in a house of cards. Shorn of the others, each stands firm. Her people are the witty, affluent, troubled, and largely superfluous heirs to their narrowing age. Ann Beattie has reached into the chaotic glitter of her generation, found one facet—its inevitable mourning—and polished it to a hard brilliance." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Review:
"Reads 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 relationships."-The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"Burning brilliance.... This collection of short stories is the work of a writer with a dazzling gift.... Beattie's eye is clear, her ear finely tuned, her mind brilliantly odd.... A joy to read."-Chicago Sun-Times
About the Author
Born in 1947, Ann Beattie grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., attended college at American University, and went on to do graduate work in English literature at the University of Connecticut. She began writing stories out of frustration with her doctoral work. After rejecting twenty-two submissions,
The New Yorker published Beattie's "A Platonic Relationship" in 1974, and Beattie became a regular contributor to the magazine. Her first collection of stories,
Distortions, and her first novel,
Chilly Scenes of Winter, appeared simultaneously in 1976 and initiated a long-standing critical debate as to whether Beattie's greater strength is in the story or the novel. All critics agree, however, on the uniqueness of her style and her uncanny ability to expose certain truths about contemporary life, particularly as it lived by those of her own generation and social class. She lives in Maine and Key West with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry.
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