Park City: New and Selected Stories

Out of frustration at not being able to find the stories in this collection, I am posting them here: Cosmos 3 Second Question 38 Going Home with Uccello 51 The Siamese Twins Go Snorkeling 58 Zalla 75 Ed and Dave Visit the City 82 The Four-Night Fight 90 Park City 100 Vermont 137 Wolf Dreams 154 Dwarf House 166 Snakes' Shoes 175 Secrets and Surprises 185 Weekend 196 A Vintage Thunderbird 211 Shifting 226 The Lawn Party 238 Colorado 251 Learning to Fall 273 The Cinderella Waltz 283 Jacklighting 300 Waiting 306 Desire 316 Greenwich Time 325 The Burning House 335 Janus 351 In the White Night 356 Heaven on a Summer Night 361 Summer People 368 Skeletons 381 Where You'll Find Me 386 The Working Girl 403 In Amalfi 410 What Was Mine 421 Windy Day at the Reservoir 431 Imagine a Day at the End of Your Life 474

When I think of Miles Davis, the word virtuoso comes to mind. When I think of Ann Beattie's short stories, the music from Miles' classic album "Kind of Blue" plays in my head. Spare, taut, controlled, yet so emotionally stripped down as to be poetic in the truest sense. This is fiction that rings like a tuning fork, humming inaubibly to the fragile souls that inhabit these works. Short stories like "Vermont", "Burning House", and "Where'll You Find Me" resonate with despair and, yet, at the same time tremble with a glimmer of hope. Bawdiness and loudness of voice, a brawling style, does not prevail in these quiet tales. But then again Ms. Beattie isn't trying to be Hemingway. She in her own way moved the short story beyong Hem and Cheever and even Carver, taking it to a realm where readers and writers are innured to listen.

This book was my first encounter with Beattie, and I must say that I was completely taken with her prose and the ease with which she provides us glimpses into her characters' lives. As a reader who revels in the chance to read writers who are technical masters of the short story form, Beattie did not disappoint. What I did find disappointing was that the stories became repetitive in theme and style so that powerful effect of the excellent ones ("Vermont, The Burning House, "Where You'll Find Me") was ultimately diluted by some of the other weaker stories. Finally, it is nice to read a female author who is unashamed to write about the human heart without an artifial device like southern charm or supposed female wackiness, both of which can sometimes be a distraction and detraction from a story

Park City is a big, hefty collection of wonderful short stories from one of our most talented writers of short fiction. Beattie writes with a detached affection for her characters and a wonderful sense of clarity. This is a collection of new stories and the greatest hits from her earlier collection. I read a lot of these stories in the 80s, but I can still remember them. The new ones are fabulous. The characters and their stories will stay with you long after you put this book down.

This is the most stunning selected stories I've read since Raymond Carver's "Where You'll Find Me." People portray Beattie as cold, but then so is the world her characters live, and so are ours. Perhaps the reason some people dislike Beattie is that she works her way gently into the reality of our lives and without our noticing, with an elegance of prose virtually unmatched, she shatters the safety in which we live, forcing us to seek for something other than the illusory grasping we call our lives. This is a fabulous book and perhaps the world of her characters seems sterile, but then look around as you stand at a busstop and you'll see what she means, how humanity lies beneath the thinly constructed facades of society and love.