A dazzling new collection from award-winning author Ann Beattie - featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections. Ann Beattie's first book, Distortions, was published more than forty years ago, but her writing is as fresh, funny, and relevant as ever. He astutely observed new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, aging, and mortality. 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). The occasion might be a wedding, a birthday, a reunion, an annual Christmas party, or another opportunity to gather and attempt to bond with relatives or chosen families. In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes. Set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, the stories in The Accomplished Guest are marked by an undercurrent of loss and an unexpected element of violence, with Beattie's signature ironic humor woven throughout. Some guests provide welcome diversions, others are uninvited interruptions, all are indelibly drawn by the endlessly amusing and brilliant Ann Beattie. --,From dust jacket.

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