Here are sixteen wonderful stories - but first collection - by celebrated novelist and short-story writer, author of the widely praised Families and Survivors and Listening to Billie. Here brought together is the best of Alice Adams' extraordinary work, which has been appearing regularly in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Redbook, and has been represented in every O. Henry Award collection for the past eight years.
The stories encompass a wide range of mood and situation, but they are alike in the delicacy and case of their unfolding, and in the certitude of their revelations, and they are all about love.
In the title story, "Beautiful Girl," a celebrated beauty of twenty years before sits in the kitchen of her San Francisco apartment facing a man who has not seen her since the days when he loved her (and feared to approach her) from afar.... In "Winder Rain" a young American girl studying in Paris agrees (foolishly) to an exorbitant rent for a tiny, drafty room (she is hypnotized by the grand manner of the elderly landlady) only to discover the fateful rightness of her decision... In "Roses, Rhododendron" we enter into a young girl's love affair with a friend's family-the mother just the opposite of her own, the father dashing and vague, the daughter of the house enchantingly everything she wants to be..."The Swastika on One Door" is about two brothers entering Harvard together in 1943, both of them outcast Southern 4-F's isolated from the tumult and romantic urgency of the war, and from their classmates, it is the story of the hostile prank in which their part (the victims_ and their response set the pattern of their future relationships.... In "Home is Where" a man and woman-like a pair of twin cats "thin and sleek and moving as one" - embark on the most unabashed and irresistible love affair of their lives....In "A Jealous Husband" a young man begins to wonder whether he isn't more truly in love with his wife's infidelity-her secret love affair-than with her....
Those ar stories providing continuous pleasure as they explore, with brilliance and grace, the mysterious ways in which the loves we choose both reveal and express our essential selves.