American · b. 1947
Ann Beattie is an American writer regarded as one of the masters of the contemporary short story, celebrated for the spare, wry, precisely observed minimalism — so distinctive it became known as 'Beattiesque' — of her many New Yorker stories.
Ann Beattie began publishing stories in The New Yorker in the mid-1970s, emerging with a voice so original and so attuned to the drift and ambivalence of her generation that her name became an adjective. Over the following decades she published dozens of stories in the magazine, along with novels including Chilly Scenes of Winter and Falling in Place.
A leading figure of American literary minimalism alongside writers such as Raymond Carver, Beattie is a master observer of the quiet disappointments of the American middle class — fraying marriages, aimless lives, unspoken tensions — rendered in spare, exact, understated prose. The New Yorker Stories (2010) collects her work for the magazine across more than thirty years.
A recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Beattie is recognized as one of the defining voices of contemporary American short fiction.
by Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie's collected New Yorker stories, spanning 1974 to 2006. Forty-eight spare, wry, precisely observed tales chronicle the drift, disappointments, and quiet epiphanies of the American middle class — the work of a master of the short story whose name became an adjective: 'Beattiesque.'
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