Search
Log in
  • Home

  • Categories

  • Audiobooks

  • E-books

  • Magazines

  • For kids

  • Top lists

  • Help

  • Download app

  • Use campaign code

  • Redeem gift card

  • Try free now
  • Log in
  • Language

    🇪🇸 España

    • ES
    • EN

    🇧🇪 Belgique

    • FR
    • EN

    🇩🇰 Danmark

    • DK
    • EN

    🇩🇪 Deutschland

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇷 France

    • FR
    • EN

    🇳🇱 Nederland

    • NL
    • EN

    🇳🇴 Norge

    • NO
    • EN

    🇦🇹 Österreich

    • AT
    • EN

    🇨🇭 Schweiz

    • DE
    • EN

    🇫🇮 Suomi

    • FI
    • EN

    🇸🇪 Sverige

    • SE
    • EN
  1. Books
  2. Fiction
  3. Contemporary fiction

Read and listen for free for 7 days!

Cancel anytime

Try free now
0.0(0)

The Accomplished Guest: Stories

* A Washington Post Notable Fiction Book of the Year

A magnificent collection from award-winning author Ann Beattie—“profoundly intriguing and unsettling stories that abound in delectably witty and furious inner monologues, barbed dialogue, ludicrous predicaments, many faceted heartaches, and abrupt upswellings of affection, even love...always on point, funny, and poignant” (Booklist, starred review).

Ann Beattie’s “seamless combination of biting wit and mordant humor, precise irony, and consummate cool” is on full display in this astutely observed collection set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, that explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality, and aging. 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). In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes.

“Ann Beattie slips into a short story as flawlessly as Audrey Hepburn wore a Givenchy gown” (Oprah Daily), and the pieces in The Accomplished Guest—featuring recent O. Henry, Pushcart, and Best American Short Story selections—are marked by an undercurrent of loss and an unexpected element of violence, with Beattie’s signature mordant humor woven throughout. Some guests provide welcome diversions, others are uninvited interruptions, all are indelibly drawn.

Beattie “punctures her characters’ pretensions and jadedness with an economy and effortless dialogue that writers have been trying to emulate for three decades” (The New York Times Book Review). The Accomplished Guest is fresh, funny, and overwhelmingly “brilliant at furnishing the precise level of niggling complexity that is tragicomically real” (San Francisco Chronicle).


Author:

  • Ann Beattie

Narrators:

  • Gabra Zackman
  • Jacques Roy

Format:

  • Audiobook
  • E-book

Duration:

  • 7 h 7 min
  • 193 pages

Language:

English

Categories:

  • Fiction
  • Contemporary fiction

More by Ann Beattie

Skip the list
  1. The New Yorker Stories

    Ann Beattie

    book
  2. Onlookers : Stories

    Ann Beattie

    audiobookbook
  3. The State We're In: Maine Stories

    Ann Beattie

    audiobookbook
  4. Mrs. Nixon : A Novelist Imagines a Life

    Ann Beattie

    book
  5. Walks With Men : Fiction

    Ann Beattie

    book
  6. Follies : New Stories

    Ann Beattie

    book
  7. The Doctor's House: A Novel

    Ann Beattie

    book

Others have also read

Skip the list
  1. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

    Mary Wollstonecraft

    book
  2. The Brontë Sisters: The Complete Novels

    Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë

    book
  3. Relatos. Vivir al límite

    Carmina Pazos

    book
  4. Amy & Isabelle

    Elizabeth Strout

    book
  5. Tender is the Night (Serapis Classics)

    F. Scott Fitzgerald

    book
  6. Far from the Madding Crowd

    Thomas Hardy, Golden Deer Classics

    book
  7. The Picture of Dorian Gray

    Oscar Wilde

    audiobookbook
  8. Un descanso verdadero

    Amos Oz

    book
  9. Collected works of George Orwell (Illustrated) : Animal Farm. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). Looking back on the Spanish War. Down and Out in Paris and London

    George Orwell

    book
  10. Dubliners

    James Joyce

    audiobookbook
  11. La zapatera prodigiosa

    Federico García Lorca

    book
  12. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

    Mary Ann Shaffer

    audiobook

  • 8 books

    Ann Beattie

    Ann Beattie has been included in five O. Henry Award Collections, in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The former 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, Virginia, and Florida.

    Read more

Help and contact


About us

  • Our story
  • Career
  • Press
  • Accessibility
  • Partner with us
  • Investor relations
  • Instagram
  • Facebook

Explore

  • Categories
  • Audiobooks
  • E-books
  • Magazines
  • For kids
  • Top lists

Popular categories

  • Crime
  • Biographies and reportage
  • Fiction
  • Feel-good and romance
  • Personal development
  • Children's books
  • True stories
  • Sleep and relaxation

Nextory

Copyright © 2025 Nextory AB

Privacy Policy · Terms ·
Excellent4.3 out of 5