Perfect Recall New Stories

Peopled by characters struggling with second marriages, abandoning artistic aspirations, or coming to terms with the betrayal of their own expectations, this collection of eleven new stories from Ann Beattie makes it strikingly clear why she is known as one of "American literature's most adept explorers and interpreters of the unraveling edges of life"(Miami Herald).From the elegiac story "The Famous Poet, Amid Bougainvillea," in which two men trade ruminations about the odd experience of being cared for by those you are meant to serve, to "The Big-Breasted Pilgrim," wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos, expressing Clinton's desire to dine at his house, to two stories in which family myths turn out to be both inaccurate and prescient,Perfect Recallcomprises Beattie's most ambitious and complex work yet.

Ann Beattie won the Pen/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 2000. She is the author of six previous collections of stories and seven novels, including, most recently, The Doctor's House. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she divides her time among Maine, Florida, and Virginia.