Perfect Recall

Peopled by characters struggling with second marriages abandoning artistic aspirations or coming to terms with the betrayal of their own expectations this collection of eleven new stories from Ann Beattie makes it strikingly clear why she is known as one of American literature's most adept explorers and interpreters of the unraveling edges of life (Miami Herald).From the elegiac story The Famous Poet Amid Bougainvillea in which two men trade ruminations about the odd experience of being cared for by those you are meant to serve to The Big-Breasted Pilgrim wherein a famous chef gets a series of bewildering phone calls from George Stephanopoulos expressing Clinton's desire to dine at his house to two stories in which family myths turn out to be both inaccurate and prescient Perfect Recall comprises Beattie's most ambitious and complex work yet.