The Stories Of Alice Adams

“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.

“She commands her material so well that we are made to believe that her fiction—her plot—is no stranger than our lives.” --Ms. Magazine Listening to Billie is a brilliant portrait of a contemporary woman adventurously, decisively embarked on her own life. We first glimpse Eliza Hamilton Quarles as a blonde boarding-school student, sitting in a sophisticated New York club, listening to Billie Holiday. She is on the brink of her marriage to her older, worldly date. Twenty years later, a mother, divorced, she, tentatively begins a new life, with new lovers, new interests, new strength, even a new, more comfortable identity.

The first full-scale biography of prolific writer Alice Adams, whose celebrated stories and bestselling novels traced women’s lives and illuminated “an era characterized both by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old expectations, conventions, and biases” (The New Yorker). “Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams,” a New York Times critic said of the prolific writer. Born in 1926, Alice Adams grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II. After college at Radcliffe and a year in Paris, she moved to San Francisco. Always a rebel in good-girl’s clothing, Adams used her education, sexual and emotional curiosity, and uncompromising artistic ambition to break the strictures that bound women in midcentury America. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. One of only four winners of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Adams wove her life into her fiction and used her writing to understand the changing tides of the 20th century. Her work portrays vibrant characters both young and old who live on the edge of their emotions, absorbed by love affairs yet always determined to be independent and to fulfill their personal destinies. Carol Sklenicka interweaves Adams’s deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events—the civil rights and women’s rights movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom. Her biography’s revealing analyses of Adams’s stories and novels from Careless Love to Superior Women to The Last Lovely City, and her extensive interviews with Adams’s family and friends, among them Mary Gaitskill, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, and Alison Lurie, give us the definitive story of a writer often dubbed “America’s Colette.” Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer captures not just a beloved woman’s life in full, but a crucial span of American history.

“Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams. . . . How can one person know so much?” --The New York Times Book Review With appearances in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Redbook, as well as in the O. Henry Award collections for eight consecutive years, Alice Adams had established herself as a master craftsman of the short story when she published her first collection. Her well-honed skill is on abundant\t display in this collection of 16 wonderful stories that encompass a wide range of mood and situation. All are linked in the delicacy and ease of their unfolding, and in the certitude of their revelations, and in the consistency of their theme: Love. Included are “Winter Rain,” “Roses, Rhododendron,” “Home is Where,” “Jealous Husband.”

The winner of the 1922 Pulitzer Prize in literature and the subject of several well-received film adaptations, Alice Adams is regarded as one of Booth Tarkington's most accomplished novels. The tale follows the exploits of the plucky young protagonist, who disregards her family's low social standing and pursues love with the well-heeled young man of her dreams.

The timeless coming-of-age novel about five young women who meet at Radcliffe College and together grow to maturity—through intrigues, ambitions, affairs, and marriages—from World War II to the 1980s. Lavinia, Peg, and Cathy seem to have little in common save for their freshman status. None of them could know that their destinies are about to inextricably intertwine. Across four decades, as time and events upend their expectations, these five women discover their sexuality, reveal their secrets, and struggle with independence—sometimes surrendering, sometimes making stunning choices. Now reissued thirty-five years after its original release, Alice Adams’s Superior Women, hailed as “a remarkable compression of time, memory, and sentiment—rather as if Hemingway had been turned loose on Proust” (San Francisco Chronicle), is a richly drawn, uncompromising novel about women’s intimate, interior lives for fans of Mary McCarthy’s The Group and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything.

Famous for illuminating the hidden workings of human relationships, Alice Adams’s short stories appeared dozens of times in The New Yorker and were a mainstay of the O. Henry Award collections. From her capstone collection The Stories of Alice Adams, “Roses, Rhododendron” chronicles the power of a lifelong friendship. When a young Jane Kilgore moves to North Carolina with her superstitious mother, she meets Harriet Farr and finds comfort and stability amongst her family. As Jane’s life takes her away from the South, she learns that her relationship with the Farrs shaped her childhood and life thereafter.

“Alice Adams turns dreams and moments, the stuff of memories, inside out and makes of them beautiful, haunting, bittersweet tales.” --Publishers Weekly Second Chances, perhaps Alice Adams most accomplished novel, is a rich, moving, and beautifully drawn portrait of six women and men, friends for years, who suddenly, and with amazement, find themselves growing old. They live in a beautiful small California town called San Sebastian, and they see each other almost daily-- Dudley and Sam Venable; Edward Crane and his younger lover, Freddy Fuentes; the widowed Celeste Timberlake; the eccentric, secretive Polly Blake. With generosity and humor and remarkable insight, Adams takes us into rich emotional territory in a novel that evokes the ways in which people continually astonish themselves, at any age, with their capacity for wonder and change.