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...