Adams, Alice. The Stories of Alice Adams. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
Reason read: June is Short Story Month.
The first time I read a collection of Alice Adams’s short stories (After You’ve Gone) I noticed similarities that soon became redundancies throughout the stories. The same is true of The Stories of Alice Adams. Virginia, San Francisco, Maine,the Carolinas, and Mexico are popular places for her characters to either live or vacation. Lawyers, artists, and writers are popular occupations for her characters. Old wealth is especially favored. Adultery, money issues, and other marital woes always seem to be in the mix from story to story. In other words, a word of caution: these stories are best consumed intermittently. Like After You’ve Gone I could not read more than one story at a time.
Lots of quotes to quote but here are two I liked, “She was simply enraged at the sea for knocking her down” (p 54) and “Adolescent memories are not only the most recent and thus the most available. They are also the least subtle, the simplest” (p 75).
Author fact: Adams was born in Virginia, raised in North Carolina, and lived in San Francisco. Sound familiar? Proof you write about what you know.
Book trivia: There are a total of 53 short stories in The Stories of Alice Adams. Two stories are mentioned more than once in the Book Lust Challenge and there are eight that I can skip because I already read them in After You’ve Gone.
Nancy said: Nancy said there was an “excellent cross section of her short works in Stories. (Book Lust, p 1).
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the very first chapter called “A…My Name is Alice” (p 1).
~*LunaSea*~ 