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 identified by critics--not by the so-called minimalists them...

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 two decades. Beattie's fiction explores the emotional...

HARTFORD -- "I am an American," states Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee of Mark Twain. "I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut -- anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees...

WASHINGTON -- It wasn't quite the way Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee had pictured it. The chairman of the campaign finance hearings had hoped to hold the session in the stately Senate Caucus Room, where he played a major role in the Watergate...

As I was saying, there’s no one like Frank Langella in American theater—unless, of course, it’s Marian Seldes. Mr. Langella is a star actor who would be at home on a 19th-century stage. He’s a big crowd-pleasing actor, a great big delightful ham. His brilliant...

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME AND OUT OF BODY to watch yourself working at today's appointments, what would you see? The visits—20, 30, even more—would be quite a parade of people, animals, and needs, wouldn't they? Ill-mannered children acting like hooligans, cats strung...