* 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).
