Ann Beattie Summary

Ann Beattie is a novelist and short-story writer whose evocations of American life at the end of the twentieth century have earned her a wide readership and sustained critical engagement for more than... Read more

Critical Essay by Terence Winch In this new book of stories, Secrets and Surprises, Beattie imagines a very real world of people trapped in relationships that don't work. Resignation is everyb... Read more

Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin The people in Ann Beattie's second book of stories, Secrets and Surprises … have gone beyond anger into numbness. As were the protagonists of her first c... Read more

Critical Essay by E. S. Duvall Beginning to read [Secrets and Surprises] is like going out alone into the night in the country: it's very dark, and the flashlight doesn't seem to illumi... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Towers [Ann Beattie] has become perhaps our most authoritative translator-transcriber of the speech-patterns, nonverbal communications, rituals, and tribal customs of those m... Read more

Critical Essay by Phoebe-lou Adams [Falling in Place] begins with a mesmerizing portrait of a family coming undone. Unfortunately it takes a turn from which it never recovers, into melodramatic viole... Read more

Critical Essay by Jack Beatty Not surprisingly, and not without justice, Ann Beattie has been praised on sociological grounds as the chronicler of this generation. (p. 34) My own view is that Ann ... Read more

Critical Essay by Pearl K. Bell [Ann Beattie] describes a wayward human landscape that is bereft of meaning, in which everyone is chronically vagrant and capricious, and unmoored…. [The] ch... Read more