Secrets and Surprises by Ann Beattie. 1980 Fawcett edition, second printing, 317 pages.  This was Beattie's follow-up collection to her debut Distortions and includes many stories previously published in the New Yorker. In a review in the New York Times for her novel Falling in Place: "Her fiction has none of the usual gimmicks and attractions that create a cult: it's not conspicuously witty or bizarre or sexy or politically defiant or eventful; in fact, it offers so colorless and cool a surface, so quiet a voice, that it's sometimes hard to imagine readers staying with it. Her subject matter, too, is deliberately banal: she chronicles the random coming and goings of disaffected young people who work in dull jobs or drop out, and spend a lot of time doing and feeling practically nothing except that low-grade depression Christopher Lasch has called the characteristic malaise of our time."

Condition: Good reading copy.

"She was twenty, and worked in an office; she was pretty because she took a lot of time with makeup, the way a housewife who really cared might flute the edges of a piecrust with thumb and index finger."