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...
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Ann Beattie's powerful contrast in her writing of tellingly detailed descriptions and stark silence has caused her work to be placed in the contemporary canon of literary minimalism, a movement identi...
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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 everybo...
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Critical Essay by Gail Godwin
The characters who populate [Secrets and Surprises] came of age during the 1960's. They are, on the whole, a nice-looking bunch of people who have never suffered f...
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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 co...
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Critical Essay by Ann Hulbert
Secrets and surprises might seem like unexpected specialties for Ann Beattie. In the pages of The New Yorker and of her two previous books—Distortions … and...
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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 illumin...
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Critical Essay by Richard Locke
"Falling in Place" is stronger, more accomplished, larger in every way than anything [Beattie's] done…. (p. 1)
Her fiction has none of the u...
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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 me...
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Critical Essay by Margaret Atwood
Readers of [Beattie's] earlier books will not be disappointed in Falling in Place…. Neither will they be particularly amazed. It's similar territ...
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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 violen...
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Critical Essay by John Calvin Batchelor
Beattie writes about suburbia because that seems her experience, first in Virginia, now in Connecticut. Her characters have little in common with Cheever'...
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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 Beat...
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Critical Essay by Whitney Balliett
[What] matters most in Ann Beattie's short stories and novels is her absolute ear and her masterly deadpan humor. When the two work together, the results are ...
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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] chaoti...
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Ann Beattie
