The Stories of Alice Adams
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“Alice Adams has an inimitable ‘voice’–quick, deft, brilliantly evocative and specific. There is always something special about a story of hers, like a watercolor perfectly executed.” --Joyce Carol Oates
Award-winning writer Alice Adams, whose major themes were the varied lives of contemporary women and the hidden workings of human relationships is equally treasured for her short stories and her novels.
The stories collected here represent the full range of her career, which included 25 appearances in The New Yorker, 6 O.Henry First Prizes out of a total of 23 appearances, as well as inclusion in numerous Best American Short Stories anthologies. In story after story insight joins with grace to show us the truth about the lives of people around us.
Included: “Verlie I Say Unto You,” “Beautiful Girl,” “The Swastika on the Door,” “Greyhound People,” “The Girl Across the Room,” Truth or Consequences,” “Separate Planes,” “Your Doctor Loves You,” “Old Love Affairs,” “Earthquake Damage,” and 43 other classic stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her long and prolific career, Adams produced five collections of stories (as well as 11 novels). Now, three years after her death, Knopf is republishing 53 of those deft and delicate stories in one volume, reprising Adams's career. Readers already in love with Adams will be pleased to re-encounter and those new to her pleased to discover the seemingly offhand openings that carry the reader deep into the story, the swift characterizations, the effortless shifts in point of view and, of course, the almost casual but dazzling sentences. Most often the protagonists are women, usually negotiating love. But Adams also wrote affectingly about mothers and daughters; the seeds for the many mother/daughter novels of the '80s and '90 must lie in her stories. Adams might have been the first to write about the hippie mother going from one abusive boyfriend to another ("By the Sea"); in the ravishing "Roses, Rhododendrons," a girl befriends the Farrs, a family with high-class pretensions, while her envious mother watches from afar. Adams often wrote about the privileged and famous, portraying actresses, concert pianists, even heiresses with deliciously messy lives. But she wrote with an awareness that privilege comes and goes and is often hard-won. Taken together, these stories betray the changing mores of the past half-century; taken in sequence, they trace the changes in the American short story over the past 40 years, some of those changes wrought by Adams herself. Adams could have been characterizing her own work when she described the Farrs' yard in "Roses, Rhododendrons": "The effect was rich and careless, generous and somewhat mysterious. I was deeply stirred." As will be her readers.
