The Accomplished Guest: Stories
Written by Ann Beattie
Narrated by Gabra Zackman and Jacques Roy
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
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).
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
The Doctor's House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Picturing Will Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to The Accomplished Guest
Related audiobooks
The State We're In: Maine Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The John Updike Audio Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5It Occurs to Me That I Am America: New Stories and Art Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cuyahoga Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Birds of a Lesser Paradise: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mendocino Fire: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fresh Complaint: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sing to It Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Past: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Bad Dreams and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chaste Clarissa Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Late in the Day: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Clever Girl Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sorry For Your Trouble: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thunderstruck: & Other Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis: Volume 1 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Off Keck Road Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Collected Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Telex from Cuba: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To Be a Man: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The (Other) You: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Man Walks Into a Room Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Other People's Love Affairs: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Saints and Sinners Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Last Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Did You Ever Have A Family Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Empty Family: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Short Stories For You
Finn Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stories of Your Life and Others Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fragile Things Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Two Scorched Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What We Talk About When We Talk About Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Full Dark, No Stars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Living Girl on Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night of the Living Rez Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Her Body and Other Parties: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream and Other Works Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is Salvaged: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales of Mystery and Imagination Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow Wallpaper: Classic Tales Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Manual for How to Love Us: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5UR Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Minority Report and Other Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Bazaar of Bad Dreams: Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Full Throttle: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Orgy: A Short Story About Desire Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Illustrated Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best of Edgar Allan Poe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for The Accomplished Guest
2 ratings0 reviews