Ann Beattie

"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, a horrific event whose repercussions 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...

Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing public figures, the only modern first lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie, like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon's wife as "interchangeable with a Martian." But decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to accounts by Nicon's...