Audiobooks by Ann Beattie

More to Say: Essays & Appreciations Audiobook

As deeply rewarding as her fiction, More to Say presents a selection of Ann Beattie’s essays, chosen and introduced by the author. From appreciations of writers, photographers, and other artists, to notes on the craft of writing itself, this is a wide-ranging, and always penetrating collection of writing never before published in book form. Ann Beattie, a master storyteller, has been delighting readers since the publication of her short stories in the 1970s and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter. But as her literary acclaim grew and she was hailed “the voice of her generation,” Beattie was also moonlighting as a nonfiction writer. These penetrating essays are stories unto themselves, closely observed appreciations of life and art. The listener travels with Beattie to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to learn about the legacy of the painter Grant Wood and his iconic painting American Gothic; to the famed University of Virginia campus with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry; to Key West, Florida, for New Years with writer and translator Harry Mathews; to a roadside near Boston in a broken-down car with the wheelchair-bound writer André Dubus. There are explorations of novels, short stories, paintings, and photographs by artists ranging from Alice Munro to Elmore Leonard, from Sally Mann to John Loengard. Whatever the subject, Ms. Beattie brings penetrating insight into literature and art that’s both familiar and unfamiliar. Ann Beattie’s nonfiction is a new way to enjoy one of the great writers of her generation. Listeners will find much to love in this journey with a curious and fascinating mind.

Ann Beattie (Author), Kirsten Potter (Narrator)

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The Accomplished Guest: Stories

A magnificent new collection from award-winning author Ann Beattie-featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections. Surprising and revealing, set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, Ann Beattie's astutely observed new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging. One theme of The Accomplished Guest is people paying visits or receiving visitors, traveling to see old friends, the joys and tolls of hosting company (and of being hosted). The occasion might be a wedding, a birthday, a reunion, an annual Christmas party, or another opportunity to gather and attempt to bond with biological relatives or chosen families. In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes. The stories in The Accomplished Guest are marked by an undercurrent of loss and an unexpected element of violence, with Beattie's signature mordant humor woven throughout. Some characters provide welcome diversions, others are uninvited interruptions, all are indelibly drawn by the endlessly amusing and accomplished Ann Beattie. Beattie's debut collection Distortions was published forty years ago, but her writing is as fresh, funny, and relevant as ever. She is "a national treasure, the author of short stories that will endure and continue to inspire" (Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review).

Ann Beattie (Author), Gabra Zackman, Jacques Roy (Narrator)

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The State We're In: Maine Stories

From a multiple prize-winning master of the short form: a stunning collection of brand-new, linked stories that perfectly capture the zeitgeist through the voices of vivid and engaging women from adolescence to old age."We build worlds for ourselves wherever we go," writes Ann Beattie. The State We're In, her magnificent new collection of linked stories, is about how we live in the places we have chosen-or been chosen by. It's about the stories we tell our families, our friends, and ourselves, the truths we may or may not see, how our affinities unite or repel us, and where we look for love. Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We're In is about more than geographical location, and certainly is not a picture postcard of the coastal state. Some characters have arrived by accident, others are trying to get out. The collection opens, closes, and is interlaced with stories that focus on Jocelyn, a wryly disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn's, sometimes challenging, sometimes embellishing her view. Riveting, witty, sly, idiosyncratic, and bold, these stories describe a state of mind, a manner of being-now. A Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "like a fresh bulletin from the front: we snatch it up, eager to know what's happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no-man's-land known as interpersonal relations." The State We're In is a fearless exploration of contemporary life by a brilliant writer whose fiction startles as it illuminates.

Ann Beattie (Author), Cassandra Campbell (Narrator)

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Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon's wife: 'interchangeable with a Martian,' she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon's point of view. Beattie packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom baby boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work.

Ann Beattie (Author), Ann Beattie (Narrator)

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Walks with Men: A Novella

He'd tell me anything, anything, as long as the information went unattributed, as long as no one knew he and I had even met. Such is the deal Jane, Harvard valedictorian fresh out of college, strikes with Neil, the intoxicating writer 20 years her senior. It is 1980 in New York City, and the two quickly become lovers, living together in a Chelsea brownstone. Jane is infatuated, but dark secrets lie beneath Neil's polished surface.

Ann Beattie (Author), Ann Beattie (Narrator)

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The Doctor's House

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ann Beattie has won three O.Henry Awards and the PEN/Bernard Malamud Award. The Washington Post says "few novelists are more adept at creating fictional atmospheres." This novel, framed in a trilogy of voices, is a complex portrait of one family and the fictions a mother, son, and daughter create to navigate their lives.

Ann Beattie (Author), Jeff Woodman, Katherine Kellgren, Suzanne Toren (Narrator)

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