Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Accomplished Guest: Stories
The Accomplished Guest: Stories
The Accomplished Guest: Stories
Audiobook7 hours

The Accomplished Guest: Stories

Written by Ann Beattie

Narrated by Gabra Zackman and Jacques Roy

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

* 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).
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 13, 2017
ISBN9781508241645
Author

Ann Beattie

Ann Beattie has been included in five O. Henry Award Collections, in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The former Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, she is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine, Virginia, and Florida.

More audiobooks from Ann Beattie

Related to The Accomplished Guest

Related audiobooks

Short Stories For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for The Accomplished Guest

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

2 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words