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Event
Ann Beattie in conversation with Nick Taylor
Sponsored by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler's
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
7:30pm
Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
"The State We're In: Maine Stories"
From a multiple prizewinning master of the short form: a stunning collection of brand-new, linked stories that perfectly capture the zeitgeist through the voices of vivid and engaging women from adolescence to old age. Her first collection in over a decade, these stories beautifully highlight all of those qualities that make Beattie "the author of short stories that will endure and continue to inspire" (The New York Times Book Review).
Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We're In is about more than geographical location, and certainly is not a picture postcard of the coastal state. Some characters have arrived by accident, others are trying to get out. The collection opens, closes, and is interlaced with stories that focus on Jocelyn, a wryly disaffected teenager living with her aunt and uncle while attending summer school. As in life, the narratives of other characters interrupt Jocelyn's, sometimes challenging, sometimes embellishing her view. Certain things recur in these stories: yellow jackets, Ben Affleck, a rare orchid that blooms only underground, dogs, Silicon Valley.
Riveting, witty, sly, idiosyncratic, and bold, these stories describe a state of mind, a manner of beingnow. A Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "like a fresh bulletin from the front: we snatch it up, eager to know what's happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no-man's-land known as interpersonal relations." The State We're In is a fearless exploration of contemporary life by a brilliant writer whose fiction startles as it illuminates.
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 has written over 17 books.
Nick Taylor is the author of the historical novels The Disagreement and Father JunÃpero's Confessor. He has also published a thriller, The Setup Man, under the pseudonym T.T. Monday.
The event is free - please register today.
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LocationKepler's Books (View)
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: Yes! |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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