Alice Adams: 32 books

“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...

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...

“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,...

“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...

“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...

“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...

“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...

“As always, Adams' strength is her fine, elegant language and the attention she pays to the minutiae of every day living. Like Jane Austen, she stays close to her characters and weaves intrigue out of their interrelated and complex life stories.” --San Jose Mercury News   In her final novel,...

“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...

“Reads easily, even breathlessly. . . . The subtle but intensely felt shifts of closeness among the young women are lovingly and expertly laid bare.” -- John Updike   This ambitious and richly compelling Superior Women is in the grand tradition of The Group and Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon...

“No other writer in recent memory has called to mind so clearly the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.”  --The Washington Post * * In Almost Perfect, Alice Adams brilliantly and movingly explores what happens to love when the beloved is transformed into someone unrecognizable.   They were an almost...

“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...

“Her stories recall such past masters as Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Mansfield.”  --Newsweek * * 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...

“What a terrific book. I loved its rich, recognizable characters, the intricacies and excitement of the plot, the beauty of the writing.”  --Anne Lamott   Reaching back to the Great Depression, and with all the insight, tenderness, and extraordinary narrative power that have been the hallmark...