Perfect Recall: New Stories

A collection of striking short stories filled with memorable characters from award-winning author Ann Beattie.

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 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 Recall comprises Beattie's most ambitious and complex work yet.

Author: Ann Beattie
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Published: 02/01/2002
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.83d
ISBN: 9780743211703

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 03/03/2002 pg. 20
New York Review of Books 07/14/2011 pg. 36

About the Author
Beattie, Ann: - Ann Beattie has been included in four O. Henry Award Collections, in John Updike's The Best American Short Stories of the Century, and in Jennifer Egan's The Best American Short Stories 2014. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She was the 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 and Key West, Florida.