The Stories of Alice Adams

With a foreword by Victoria Wilson, Alice Adams’s longtime editor.
 
Famous for illuminating the hidden workings of human relationships, Alice Adams's work was a staple in The New Yorker and a mainstay of the O. Henry Award collections. The Stories of Alice Adams gathers fifty-three of her most celebrated pieces into one career-defining collection.

In "Verlie I Say Unto You," the unexpected death of Verlie Jones's lover reveals the unsettling truth about her employers--that, though they "couldn't get along without" Verlie, their maid of ten years, she is nothing more than a stranger to them. In "Berkeley House," a disenfranchised daughter anguished over the sale of her childhood home, discovers that it does not hold the key to her happiness, and perhaps never did. In "Greyhound People," a woman repeatedly and purposely takes the wrong bus from work after meeting its warm and disarmingly candid cast of passengers.

In story after story, insight joins with grace to show us the truth about the lives of people around us. A moving and elegant collection and the capstone to a brilliant career.

ALICE ADAMS was born in Virginia and raised in North Carolina, and graduated from Radcliffe College. The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, she received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She was the author of five collections of short stories and ten novels, among them Listening to Billie, Superior Women, Second Chances, and A Southern Exposure. She lived in San Francisco until her death in 1999.