Love Always

by Ann Beattie

Overview

From an award-winning, national bestselling author comes a "ferociously funny” novel (The Los Angeles Times) about an advice columnist in Vermont whose life is about to be turned upside down. 

Lucy Spenser, the Miss Lonelyhearts of a chic counter-cultural magazine, finds her unflappable Vermont life completely upended by her teenaged soap-opera-star niece, Nicole, and her hangers-on.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307765741
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/06/2011
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	790,429
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

ANN BEATTIE has published eight novels and ten collections of stories, among them Chilly Scenes of Winter, Falling in Place, The Burning House, Love Always, Picturing Will, and Another You. She was the Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia (emerita). She is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.

Hometown:

Maine and Key West, Florida

Date of Birth:

September 8, 1947

Place of Birth:

Washington, D.C.

Education:

B.A., American University, 1969; M.A., University of Connecticut, 1970

Editorial Reviews

Lacking the elements that distinguish Beattie's earlier novels, Love Always relies instead on transparent and relentless use of her several stylistic idiosyncracies. The results are stereotyped characters and situations. ``Bleak and unconvincing,'' PW found. (August)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"This novel is sadder than satire, for it is about the emptiness not of these lives but of our lives." -- The New Yorker

John Updike

"Through Beattie's agency we are brought within sufficient sympathetic distance that our empathy is engaged. And that is how most good writing begins to achieve the level of literature." -- Esquire

Richard Ford

"A very funny book....If Jane Austen has been crossed with Oscar Wilde and Re-Crossed with the early Evelyn Waugh, and the result plunked down among the semi-beautiful people of the late 20th-century media-fringe America...the outcome might have been something like this." -- The Chicago Sun Times

Margaret Atwood

"Flatly a brilliant concoction....Like Jane Austen, Beattie rides the surface of her character's lives with an amazing agility....She's funnier than ever." -- The Dallas Morning News

Beverly Lowry

"Anne Beattie has filed yet another anthropologist report on a certain part of America, warts and all. Every bit of it is good entertainment -- especially the words." -- The Detroit News

Ann Tyler

"Her most comic novel thus far ... raises serious questions about the nature of love."—The New York Times Book Review

“A master chronicler of our life and times.”—Newsday
 
“A very funny book. . . . If Jane Austen had been crossed with Oscar Wilde and re-crossed with the early Evelyn Waugh, and the result plonked down among the semi-beautiful people of the late 20th-century media-fringe America . . . the outcome might have been something like this.”—Margaret Atwood
 
“Ferociously funny.”—The Los Angeles Times
 
“Beattie’s new novel, her third, is a gratifying surprise. Love Always will be welcomed by the large and loyal Beattie readership, but there is much that recommends it to the previously unconverted.”—Harper’s Bazaar
 
“Beattie’s most comic—indeed her first satiric—work to date. . . . Much of the book’s authenticity derives from the accretion of felt detail—a Beattie trademark. She captures 1984 Vermont with right-on references to Cyndi Lauper, Horchow catalogues, and ‘pre-Cabbage Patch’ Coleco.”—The Christian Science Monitor

From the Publisher