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Park City: New and Selected Stories by Ann…
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Park City: New and Selected Stories (edition 1999)

by Ann Beattie

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1331203,759 (3.5)1
Thirty-six stories--eight appearing in a book for the first time and a generous selection from her earlier collections--give us Ann Beattie at stunning mid-career. Emotionally complex, edgy, and funny, the stories encompass a huge range of tone and feeling. The wife of a couple who have lost a child comforts her husband with an amazing act of tenderness. A man who's been shifting from place to place, always finding the same kind of people--sometimes the same people in various configurations--tries to locate himself in the universe. An intricate dance of adultery brings down a marriage. A housekeeper experiences a startling epiphany while looking into her freezer one hot summer night. The long, humorous roll of a couple's "four-night fight" finally explodes into happiness. Beattie has often been called the chronicler of her generation, and these stories capture perfectly the moods and actions of our world since the seventies: people on the move, living in group houses, smoking too much dope; people settling down, splitting up, coming to terms. Margaret Atwood said of a previous collection that "a new Beattie is almost 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 new stories have the same power. A family secret is revealed in a strange and puzzling act that becomes understood only many years later. In an AIDS ward, certain questions take on special significance. A hostile eight-year-old and his father's live-in girlfriend move in fits and starts toward détente. In prose by turns laserlike and lyrical, these memorable, evocative stories authentically recall the details and feelings of their time. But the truths revealed are--as in all fiction of the first rank--timeless.… (more)
Member:cocoshka
Title:Park City: New and Selected Stories
Authors:Ann Beattie
Info:Vintage (1999), Paperback, 496 pages
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Park City: New and Selected Stories by Ann Beattie

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The cover of this book features a quotation from the New York Times Book Review, relating that "One feels amazed at the confidence, steadiness and quality of [her work]". I thought this was weird before I read this excellent collection of short stories, and think it's even weirder after having finished it. I'm not sure why one should be "amazed."

I was in fact a bit surprised by this book, but only surprised that I'd never heard of Beattie.

She has a way of drawing you into lives that are familiar but strange, frequently familiar for their strangeness. Every now and then lines jump out that both fit into the surrounding narrative and context yet manage despite their subtlety to cast everything that had been built up to that point in a different light. I'm not sure whether to call this an effect (if it is, it is one she uses sparingly, and variedly) but it is in any case a gift. Actually, something like this effect may be said to pervade her writing, and is part of what makes it such a pleasure to read, and so fruitfully re-readable. ( )
  lukeasrodgers | Sep 20, 2013 |
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Thirty-six stories--eight appearing in a book for the first time and a generous selection from her earlier collections--give us Ann Beattie at stunning mid-career. Emotionally complex, edgy, and funny, the stories encompass a huge range of tone and feeling. The wife of a couple who have lost a child comforts her husband with an amazing act of tenderness. A man who's been shifting from place to place, always finding the same kind of people--sometimes the same people in various configurations--tries to locate himself in the universe. An intricate dance of adultery brings down a marriage. A housekeeper experiences a startling epiphany while looking into her freezer one hot summer night. The long, humorous roll of a couple's "four-night fight" finally explodes into happiness. Beattie has often been called the chronicler of her generation, and these stories capture perfectly the moods and actions of our world since the seventies: people on the move, living in group houses, smoking too much dope; people settling down, splitting up, coming to terms. Margaret Atwood said of a previous collection that "a new Beattie is almost 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 new stories have the same power. A family secret is revealed in a strange and puzzling act that becomes understood only many years later. In an AIDS ward, certain questions take on special significance. A hostile eight-year-old and his father's live-in girlfriend move in fits and starts toward détente. In prose by turns laserlike and lyrical, these memorable, evocative stories authentically recall the details and feelings of their time. But the truths revealed are--as in all fiction of the first rank--timeless.

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