Perfect Recall: A Short Story

By Ann Beattie

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0743211693
• ISBN13: 9780743211697
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

She Makes a Book Your Friend

Ann Beattie's collection of eleven stories, peopled by closet eccentrics, is aptly titled Perfect Recall. With her particular brand of storytelling, it appears that Beattie has mastered perfect recall, if not total recall, herself. She christens at least one character in each story with it. This, of course, introduces conflict. Everyone's perception of the past is quite different.I'm most amazed by the tremendous amount of imagery and details Ann Beatty can compress into one short story as well as into one enlightening opening paragraph which serves as the "hook" you can't say no to. Beattie has a unique talent to get what appears to be everything in her writer's mind down and still make her fiction sound very real.Is it real? Some of it? Fiction writers write what they know and then some but this author's imagination soars with ideas from which spring vivid specifics. Yet all is set down in complete, coherent paragraphs, which admittedly ramble, but you don't care, you indulge.In fact, ingesting is an ultimate high. Beattie's writing is like conversation with a good friend. You come away feeling better because she chose to include you in her thoughts.