Ann Beattie’s advent in the 1970s as the voice of a generation helped create a global short story renaissance. Her explorations of the subtle cruelties and desires of the heart have continually sustained and advanced the story form, and she has been honored with the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for the Short Story. She is the author of numerous books, including the collections Onlookers (Scribner, 2023), Follies, The State We’re In, and The Accomplished Guest, as well as the novels Chilly Scenes of Winter, Another You, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, and A Wonderful Stroke of Luck. Beattie lives in Maine and Key West.

Photograph by Sigrid Estrada.

On Nancy Hale’s “Flotsam”

An Essay

by Ann Beattie

Read Nancy Hale’s “Flotsam” here.


Is this an old-fashioned story? One that doesn’t really, you know, pertain anymore? No requisite zeitgeist, a foreigner (Da Silva) whose perceived character taps into ethnic assumptions . . . and how sexy is a grandmother as the main character, anyway?

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