Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 28, 2012.

Ann Beattie is a short story writer and novelist who, after numerous earlier rejections from The New Yorker, had a story accepted by the magazine in 1974. Two more acceptances followed that year, five the next and regularly from then on to the extent that, as Judith Shulevitz says in the New York Times Book Review, Beattie “becomes so intimately associated with the magazine that people begin to talk of a New Yorker school of short fiction.”  Beattie’s most recent collection, The New Yorker Stories, is a compilation of those 48 stories published from 1974 through 1986 and was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2010.

Beattie was born in 1947 in Washington, D.C. and graduated from American University and the University of Connecticut. She is the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her first collection of stories, Distortions, and her critically acclaimed first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, were both published in 1976. Seven story collections have followed and seven novels, as well as a novella, Walks With Men (2010). Beattie’s next book, Mrs. Nixon, will be published in November 2011 and she says of it: “…(it) is a cross-genre book based on fact, but one that takes Mrs. Nixon’s life as a point of departure to present and analyze the way fiction writers write and think.” Beattie is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has received the Rea Award for the Short Story, a PEN/Malamud award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Maine.

In this episode she is introduced by Michael Silverblatt and then reads from her work. The companion Conversation episode may be found here.

Additional photos of this event are available on Flickr.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to audio recordings of this event there.