The State We're In: Maine Stories

by Ann Beattie Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Overview

“Ann Beattie at her most magnificent...Her first new collection in ten years...These tales explore the range of emotional states the author is famous for: longing, disaffection, ambivalence, love, regret. It's nice to hear her voice again” (People).

“A peerless, contemplative page-turner” (Vanity Fair), The State We're In is about how we live in the places we have chosen-or been chosen by. It's about the stories we tell our families, our friends, and ourselves, the truths we may or may not see, how our affinities unite or repel us, and where we look for love.

Many of these stories are set in Maine, but The State We're In is about more than geographical location. Some characters have arrived in Maine by accident, others are trying to escape. The collection is woven around Jocelyn, a wry, 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.

“Ann Beattie slips into a short story as flawlessly as Audrey Hepburn wore a Givenchy gown: an iconic presentation, each line and fold falling into place but allowing room for surprise” (O, The Oprah Magazine). “Splendid...memorable...every page...fitted out with the blessed finery of hypnotic storytelling” (The Washington Post), these stories describe a state of mind, a manner of being. The State We're In explores, through women's voices, the unexpected moments and glancing epiphanies of daily life.

Editorial Reviews

Los Angeles Times - David Ulin

"Moving fluidly between adolescents and septuagenarians, it leaves us with the sense that uncertainty, disconnection, is not a matter of chronology but rather of being alive."

Vanity Fair - Nicole Jones

A peerless, contemplative page-turner.

W magazine

Ann Beattie’s gorgeous The State We’re In makes a strong case for the significance of place."

The Philadelphia Inquirer - Katherine Hill

Marvelous… all part of a masterful narrative structure in which seeds planted early bloom powerfully near the end, never quite as we expect. It happens in every story, and the effect is even more pleasurable across the span of this linked collection… a book packed with emotional errors and lines that will take your breath away.

USA Today - Carmela Ciuraru

Some things never change, but that can be a good thing — as in the subtlety and wit of Ann Beattie’s fiction… Beattie’s sharp, funny dialogue is evident throughout…The State We’re In is a strong collection, offering Beattie’s sly insights into marriage, family,home, friendship, and much more.

Newsday - Tom Beer

No one writes a short story quite like Beattie does…what unifies these gems is the author's droll, off-kilter perspective on the human race.

The Buffalo News - Karen Brady

The incomparable Ann Beattie’s cunning new story collection... remarkable (and witty)... finding meaning in the mundane and using the small to define the large... Beattie’s Maine can be another’s New York, Tennessee or Montana— so distinct and so quotidian are her characters."

Vogue - Megan O'Grady

"What has always set Beattie’s stories apart is their open-ended capaciousness, so unlike the deterministic, epiphany-shaped prose that has defined the short form... THE STATE WE'RE IN is a revelation, and is shaded by the perspective of an author who now understands both sides of a generational divide... In a Beattie story, perspective is preeminent, and it’s never one you expect. The unwieldiness of human nature, the strangeness of time and circumstance, inevitably shine through."

Miami Herald - Ellen Kanner

Slyly funny, still exhibiting the author’s nonlinear narrative style and unique gift of reflecting our inner angst with our surroundings... With a few deft strokes and not a little humor, Beattie paints the nuances... A sense of discomfort pervades The State We’re In, but thanks to the Beattie’s trademark sleek prose and perfectly calibrated authorial distance, it makes for weirdly entertaining reading."

The Boston Globe - Laura Collins Hughes

A delicious new collection… Funny and consistently surprising,the stories of The State We’re In have the precision and softness of watercolor sketches... masterfully executed, each contributing to a portrait of a place... Imbued with clear-eyed compassion…These stories are also rife with the secret rituals and intimacies of marriage, with all its warfare and devotion.

Portland Press Herald - Joan Silverman

Cause for readers to celebrate… edgy, unfiltered.

Howard Norman

"Splendid... memorable... Beattie’s sociological wit and probity are truly unsurpassed in our literature... though I didn’t think this was possible, I experienced an even more heightened awe of Beattie’s skills... The dexterity of tone, fearless honesty, and close mapping of lives that may lead to ghastly revelations or even redemption are sheer gifts of reading... this collection has many, many moments of utter surprise. In fact, every page is fitted out with the blessed finery of hypnotic storytelling."

STARRED review Publishers Weekly

The collection demonstrates Beattie’s craftsmanship, precise language, and her knack for revealing psychological truths.

Kirkus Reviews

The veteran short story master explores the peculiarities of summer life…What unifies these stories outside of their setting is Beattie’s nuanced understanding of relationships…An engaging collection of varied characters.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Carol Memmott

"Edgy, funny and dark... Beattie’s unerring dialogue exposes each story’s truths... effortless grace."

People Magazine

"Short-story queen Beattie is back with her first new collection in 10 years... These tales explore the range of emotional states the author is famous for: longing, disaffection, ambivalence, love, regret. It's nice to hear her voice again."

Shelf Awareness - Tom Lavoie

"Sparkling.... [her stories] finish with a quiet flourish, throwing a sudden subtle twist at us... In the end, these carefully drawn, minutely illustrated portraits of women— and men— depict slices of life in all its complexity."

Elle

Interconnected stories from a master of the form.

Marie Claire - Steph Optiz

A real keeper…[these stories] give voice to teens in turmoil, bad parents, tête-à-têtes of all sorts, and so much more.

Booklist, STARRED review - Donna Seaman

“Beattie is a master at depicting the peculiarly painful valor necessary for contending with troubled family members,spouses, lovers, neighbors, even pets. She is also that rarest of beings, a brilliantly comic literary writer… Most often, it’s her skirmishing dialogue that makes us laugh out loud… [a] stellar collection by Beattie, a writer revered and honored for her keen insights and wit.

O, The Oprah Magazine - Hamilton Cain

"Beattie’s signature gifts – her finely tuned language, droll wit, unerring feel for popular culture– are on rich display here…vivid…More than a paean to the Pine Tree State, The State We’re In underscores the indelible contribution Beattie has made to American short fiction.”

The San Francisco Chronicle - Carolyn Cooke

As always, she illuminates the outskirts of interpersonal apocalypse, a ‘state’ more material than geographical, riddled with cultural paraphernalia."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Dale Singer

"Beattie’s stories are about life at its most basic and genuine. But her special gift of language and insight raise them above the ordinary.

Interview - Heidi Julavits

One of America’s finest authors—and arguably best living short-story writer.

The Millions

Call her the American Alice Munro, call her a New Yorker darling,call this the perfect summer read.

Portland Oregonian - Natalie Serber

The epiphany-resistant nature of Beattie's stories demands much of her readers, and ultimately is a gift. For without easy closure or false resolutions, we leave these pages with her characters still acting in an unpredictable world that looks very much like our own.

People Magazine

"Short-story queen Beattie is back with her first new collection in 10 years... These tales explore the range of emotional states the author is famous for: longing, disaffection, ambivalence, love, regret. It's nice to hear her voice again."

Kirkus Reviews

2015-05-20
The veteran short story master explores the peculiarities of summer life among well-off and often emotionally unwell Maine denizens. Beattie (Mrs. Nixon, 2011, etc.) helped set the template for minimalist fiction in the 1980s, but she's roamed stylistically since then, and these 15 lightly linked stories are as varied as the moods of their lead characters. A trio of stories centers on Jocelyn, a teenager sent to live with her aunt and uncle while her mother recovers from surgery for Lyme disease; her struggles in a writing class echo her need to develop a mature sense of her world's complexity. Sometimes Beattie imagines that world as light and quirky, as in "Elvis Is Ahead of Us," in which teens discover a room full of Elvis-bust lamps in an unoccupied house. Elsewhere, the milieu is darker and more absurd, a place where one man is killed after accidentally rousing a nest of yellow jackets and another is flung over a cliff by a storm during his wedding. What unifies these stories outside of their settings is Beattie's nuanced understanding of relationships: at her best, in "The Stroke," an aging husband and wife preparing for bed discuss their love-hate feelings toward their children, casually grooming each other while musing about "how lovely it would be to just grab the clump of them and cut them out." Some pieces read like sketches with promising characters but little movement: a 77-year-old writer discusses poetry with an IRS agent, a doctor reminisces about her life in New York before moving north, an author interviews a local for a book about "people who have negative effects on other people's lives." A full novel on Jocelyn might be more fulfilling, but Beattie clearly enjoys wandering around the neighborhood. An engaging collection of varied characters, if varying degrees of substance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171148454
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	08/11/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The State We're In

---

By Ann Beattie

Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Copyright © 2015 Ann Beattie
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0781-8

---

CHAPTER 1

"The Fledgling"

You weren't supposed to touch birds, because they wouldn't be allowed back in the nest, right? If you got your human smell on them. Or was that an old wives' tale? Were there still old wives who told tales, or did everyone know everything now, including how to remove red wine stains, how to make your tablecloth soft, how to keep salt from getting moist in the container? Oh, it was a world of rice now, very little ingested because quinoa was so popular, that and tabouli and spelt, though rice grains were still put in saltshakers. Rice was still thrown at weddings. Certain weddings.

Poor little dirty sad frightened bird! Poor distraught elders! They all feared the worst scenario: death by drowning; death by starvation; an ugly end with no one but them as witnesses, and they could do nothing except send up a storm of sound and hope either the gods, or the humans who acted like gods, would do the right thing, that one of them would be the savior. She was obviously that, staring nervously for only a few seconds before dropping everything, checking her impulse to plunge in her hand, running inside for the oven mitts, guaranteed to be safe for food cooked up to 450 degrees.

Into the house she ran, out of the house she ran, hands in mitts. But she didn't want to crush it. It was so small. So sodden. The skin of its tiny head looked like the crows'-feet fanning out from the corners of her eyes.

The birds were making a terrible sound, two on the ground as if facing off with her, yet much too far away. Two others sitting high up in the tree were making the loudest noise. She was capable of reaching in, even though the mitts made the use of her hands awkward, to say the least, and lifting out the little thing and putting it on the walkway, where she hoped all traces of Roundup were gone from the spraying done by the lawn service, to keep weeds from sprouting in the sand between bricks ... maybe put it on the grass. Though it looked like it would need all the traction it could get. What was the scenario? She could retreat to the house or go to the car and turn on the AC and watch in her rearview mirror to see Mother Bird swoop down and — however she did it — enfold Baby Bird somehow, and lift it again to the nest, which she imagined she saw — either that or some dead leaves — mid-tree. Well, it was nature. It would work out. Of course it would. She kept focusing on the near future because the little bird was cupped in her oven mitts now. When suddenly she remembered something she had forgotten for ... well, for most of her life. It was a poem that began "Good-bye, little fledgling, fly away." Her grandmother, who'd been such a good baker, had placed in the center of her famous apple pies made with three kinds of apples a little black bird with an open beak, a pie bird, to release steam. A simplified version of a bird, a little objet, the clever baker's secret to a perfect pie.

It was standing there. It was either shivering or trying to move its wet wings. It could have died in the recycling. What if she'd hurried on, thought the happy birds were just voicing their happy songs? Both birds had now flown from the lawn back into the tree. One kept flying up and landing exactly where it had started from. Surely it had a plan? The little bird was slightly lopsided. It made a motion resembling a hop. It opened its beak and made a slightly louder sound than it had made in the blue plastic recycling container, which seemed to alarm it and make it tilt farther sideways. She was overstaying her welcome. Car plan: she scooped up her purse and bag, still wearing the cumbersome silver oven mitts. That was the way she looked as she emerged from under the bower of wisteria, making it a point not to torture herself by looking back, and greeted the man in the open-doored mail truck, only slightly surprised to have come upon her looking the way she did: rather frantic, breathing heavily, her hands like lobster claws immobilized by thick rubber bands.

Regardless of her grandmother's lessons and always gently delivered advice, she'd never made a pie in her life.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The State We're In by Ann Beattie. Copyright © 2015 Ann Beattie. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Videos