At the time Stella Blake meets Richard Fallon, she is nearly broke. Her semi-famous father, who has always neglected her, is dying. Her job at a San Francisco newspaper is only tentative. Richard, on the other hand, is wildly successful as a commercial artist, even if both his marriages to bosomy...
“Alice Adams writes with beautiful economy, an infallible sense of the telling detail—she can reveal more in a few sentences than most writers do in a bulgingly over-fed chapter.” --San Francisco Chronicle Once again, Alice Adams demonstrates her mastery of the family maze, her astonishing pe...
Eager to escape her carhop mother and the rank and file of her California town, Megan Greene heads for Radcliffe in part to pursue an older man (twenty-one, Harvard medical school, Cape Cod summers) who represents her dream of the upper-middle-class, conservative East Coast. What Megan finds ar...
I think that Alice Adams is quite underrated. Her books are highly readable and have a sort of airy, weightless quality about them, but they have a real sureness and incisiveness about them, too. They make me think of French pastries, quick to eat but hard to make. This book wasn't my favorite of...
The novel deals in a quiet, understated way with the complicated relationships between two sisters, their mother, a daughter, some husbands and lovers, and with the attempts of various characters to make sense out of their aimless lives. I was intrigued but ultimately unsatisfied with this novel....
“Alice Adams writes with beautiful economy, an infallible sense of the telling detail. Her place in the company of John Updike and Mary McCarthy.” --San Francisco Chronicle Alice Adams’ reputation as a short story writer continued to grow with each collection. The stories in her third collecti...
"A work that will be for many readers as memorable as the last decade's Superior Women, and her exquisite novel from the 1970s, Listening to Billie."--San Francisco ChronicleIt is 1939, a brief, hopeful moment between the Depression and war. The Baird family--Harry, Cynthia, and their precocious ...
“Sophisticated, charming, often nostalgic, and so artfully written that half the time you don’t know that you are reading on of the best writers around.” --The Boston Globe In her final collection, Alice Adams ranges from San Francisco to a North Carolina college town, to a run-down resort in ...
“A you-can’t-put-it-down book. . . . Alice Adams has found a new way to tell the great American dynasty stories we all love.” --The Washington Post Alice Adams’ second novel is the portrait of a Southern-born woman as she reviews her life. From Louisa Calloway’s Southern girlhood to her debut...
Throughout her acclaimed career, Alice Adams demonstrated a remarkable finesse in both the novel and the short story. Her second collection reveals her ability to feelingly project whole lives in the space of a few pages. Here are people trying to pull free of the constraints of family bonds...
“A painful and hilarious send-up of grandiose doctors and their barbaric medical miracles. . . . A postmodern Jane Austen romp.” – The Boston Globe In a novel that brilliantly conjures up the resilience of the human spirit, Alice Adams draws a clear-eyed portrait of a woman who must overcome he...
At the same time, she invented for herself an actual Lady V., whom she saw as tall and skinny, like a crane, with a great long pointed “aristocratic” nose, skimpy hair, and no breasts. Although at the same time a more reasonable interior voice informed her that under no circumstances even for a m...
She noticed it immediately: her name and address handwritten on the front in black ink, the calligraphy stylish and precise. Hand-addressed letters were becoming rarer these days and usually meant a treat, or at least not a bill, so it was the first envelope she opened once she’d let herself in a...
You move back in,” says Meredith, in her lovely, low, dishonest Southern voice. Carter asks, “But—Adam?” “I’m not seeing him anymore.” Her large face, not pretty but memorable, braves his look of disbelief. Her big, deep-brown eyes are set just too close; her shapely mouth is a little too full, a...
To her husband, Van, who loved her (in his way), both the fact of her dying and her continuous, ferociously whispered accusations were intolerable. She was supposed to have died early in the summer. “To be quite honest, old man, I’m surprised she lasted through the spring,” the friendly internist...
Theirs was a balanced, exceptionally happy friendship: skinny, scared, precocious Prudence Jamieson and pretty, placid, trustful Laura Lee Matthews. Such friendships quite often occur, of course, among small girls. They find each other. What was perhaps unusual about this one was its having been ...
And near Half Moon Bay, just below the town of San Sebastian, the yellow becomes bright orange, in hundreds and hundreds of pumpkins, lying all carelessly across the fields in late October. Much of this spectrum of color is visible from the small enclosed deck that Celeste and Charles (her design...