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"So vivid and beguiling is Beattie's writing that it isn't until you look again that you realize how rarely she reaches for metaphors or other figures of speech, and how little she needs to. Rushing along on the quicksilver surface of her stories are the casually invoked bright and shiny objects that help give them their uncanny air of the actual....In the end these sparkling stories succeed not as diagnoses of the state of our unions, but as stories, pure and simple -- slices of life whose larger significance you can't quite pin down, about people who seem as real as any friend of a friend of a friend you've ever heard something interesting about. True, Beattie's stories can sometimes seem like an eight-car pileup of secondary anecdotes and third husbands. But as the narrator of one of her earlier stories put it: 'What happens can't be stopped. Aim for grace.' More often than anyone has a right to, Ann Beattie nails it. "

Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times, 1/14/ 2001

"PERFECT RECALL is a collection of the old--well, the old contemporary--school: a welcome rebellion against the novel-in-stories so trendy these days. Beattie exercises variations on only a few plots and themes here; many characters from different stories might have easily been snipped and cut to become one another. But her decision to keep each piece distinct underscores the small nuances of difference--sudden divergences--that delightfully separate story collections from novels...This may be Beattie's finest work in years, an end-of-the-century ode whose resonance grows greater at the dawn of the century ahead."

Chicago Tribune Books, 02/25/2001

Perfect Recall: New Stories: Search Results