| Ann Beattie in the Loft November 7 |
The Music Hall and RiverRun Bookstore announce a new event in the Writers in the Loft series. On Monday, November 7, the award-winning writer and celebrated New Yorker magazine contributor Ann Beattie will join the series with her new work, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life. Ticket purchase includes book, bar beverage, and author meet-and-greet/signing (Continued below)
Her appearance with Writers in the Loft will take place at the Music Hall Loft at
Now, she brings us a riveting exploration of former First Lady Pat Nixon. Beattie’s writing has always reflected her interest in minor or marginalized characters. With Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines A Life, she creates a startlingly original portrait of this elusive icon – one of America’s most famous marginalized characters – drawn from a wealth of sources ranging from books by Woodward and Bernstein, Jonathan Schell, Mary McCarthy and H.R. Haldeman to articles found in old Life Magazines, vanity press books, and photos of the Nixons.
The result is an unprecedented and deeply personal glimpse into Beattie’s brilliant (and sometimes very funny) imagination, and into the life of this historical female figure. It is also an intriguing and revelatory look at how a writer creates and imagines a life.
Margaret Talcott of the Music Hall says, “I can think of no better writer to profile the mysterious Pat Nixon and time she lived in. Like Ann Beattie herself, Mrs. Nixon spoke to a generation of women, but in a very different and haunting way.”
Ann Beattie will also discus the just-released paperback edition of her heralded collection The New Yorker Stories, named one of The Top 10 Books of 2010 by The New York Times Book Review.
About the author
Ann Beattie’s work has been included in four O. Henry Award Collections and in John Updike's The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In 2000, she received the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story form. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. She and her husband, the artist Lincoln Perry, live in
About Writers in the Loft, ticket purchases
Writers in the Loft is akin to The Music Hall’s anchor author series, Writers on a New England Stage, featuring well-known authors but in a smaller, more intimate space. It is produced as a partnership between The Music Hall and RiverRun Bookstore with Series Sponsor Citizens Bank. The series brings audiences the best of fiction and nonfiction from today’s top writers.
Tickets for Writers in the Loft: Ann Beattie will go on sale to members at noon Friday, September 9, and on sale to the general public Friday, September 23. The ticket package is $40 ($37 members) and includes reserved seat, book (Mrs. Nixon, $26.00 hardcover), and bar beverage; author presentation/reading, Q+A, and book signing meet-and-greet. Packages can be purchased through The Music Hall Box Office, located at
SERIES SPONSOR: Citizens Bank
PRAISE FOR MRS. NIXON
“After The New Yorker Stories showcased her masterful, award-winning fiction, this finger-on-society’s-pulse storyteller presents a uniquely intimate and illuminating hybrid of biography, literary analysis, memoir, and fiction. The book’s subject is as surprising as its form….Beattie, scintillating and intrepid, performs electrifying close readings of Chekhov, Carver, and Tennessee Williams; and shares her deep delight in and gratitude for the “odd life” of a writer. Hilarious if trenchant, Beattie has created a resplendent paean to the pleasures of the literary imagination, and a riveting and mischievous, revealing and revitalizing portrait of an overlooked woman of historic resonance. This book’s fascinating subject and fresh approach will ignite exceptionally lively attention.”
–Booklist
“You know you are in the presence of great writing when you cannot think of anything at all like it anywhere else in your experience as a reader. This is a beautifully constructed meditation/magic show, by the woman who knows us more deeply than we know ourselves. At once comic, antic, biting, sardonic, and moving, Mrs. Nixon is a brilliant vision of the nature of our own myths, and about our need to make them. Chief among its fascinations, for me, is that its writer is deeding her famous and enigmatic character the dignity of separateness while at the same time profoundly understanding her--and her strange husband. And her time. And our time. And us. Of course. All of us.
Only Ann Beattie, with her amazing insight and eye, her wit and subtle wisdom, could have written it.”
–Richard Bausch, author of Peace
"This is Ann Beattie's most daring work to date, wholly unexpected and original. At its center is Pat Nixon, Everywoman -- projected on the giant screen of American history with luminous personal detail. Mrs. Nixon is brilliant, unforgettable."
—Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and The Passages of H.M.
“The penetrating and sometimes caustic Beattie, who defined a generation with her O. Henry– and PEN/Malamud Award–winning works, reimagines someone we’ve hardly thought about at all: Pat Nixon, wife of the hugely ambitious and hugely fallible President. Here’s a book that examines the imagination of the writer as much as the subject itself.”
–Library Journal