ONLOOKERS is an astute new story collection about people living in the same Southern town whose lives intersect in surprising ways. Peaceful Charlottesville, Virginia, drew national attention when white nationalists held a rally there in 2017; the repercussions of this horrific event are still felt today. Confederate monuments such as General Robert E. Lee atop his horse were then still standing. The statues are a constant presence and a metaphoric refrain throughout this collection, though they represent different things to different characters. Some landmarks may have faded from consciousness but provoke fresh outrage when viewed through newly opened eyes.

At a boarding school in New Hampshire, Ben joins the honor society led by Pierre LaVerdere, an enigmatic and brilliant, yet perverse, teacher who instructs his students not only about how to reason, but how to prevaricate. As the years go by, LaVerdere's covert and overt instruction lingers in his students' lives as they seek some sense of purpose or meaning. While relationships with his stepmother and sister improve, and a move to upstate New York offers respite from his anxiety about love and work, LaVerdere's reappearance in his life disturbs his equilibrium. Everything he once thought he knew about his teacher --- and himself --- is called into question.

Set along the East Coast from Maine to Key West, Ann Beattie’s new collection explores unconventional friendships, frustrated loves, mortality and aging. One theme of THE ACCOMPLISHED GUEST is people paying visits or receiving visitors, traveling to see old friends, the joys and tolls of hosting company (and of being hosted). The occasion might be a wedding, a birthday, a reunion, an annual Christmas party, or another opportunity to gather and attempt to bond with biological relatives or chosen families. In some stories, as in life, what begins as a benign social event becomes a situation played for high stakes.

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. Ann Beattie's 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.

The rare First Lady who did not write a book, Pat Nixon remains one of the most mysterious and enigmatic public figures in recent history. Ann Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon’s wife. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man.

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.