This enchanting story by Alice Adams is about friendship, love (for people and places), and marriage. The narrator recalls how, after she and her mother moved from Boston to North Carolina, a lifelong friendship developed after she fell permanently in love with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside. She forms a strong bond with each member of the family, and later learns that their shared fondness for her may have been the only thing that kept them together. Themes include friendship, mother-daughter relationships, marriage, city vs. country living, the beauty of nature.

The city in this story from Alice Adams is San Francisco. An attractive young woman invites an aging, recently widowed doctor to a party where he encounters people who bring back unpleasant memories from his past. After fantasizing about a potential relationship with the woman, he learns she is an investigative journalist looking for a story. Disenchanted, he decides to move to Mexico to care for his ailing mother and help in two charity clinics he has established there. At least I more or less understand the corruption there, he argues. Themes: love, grief, memories, loneliness, hope, corruption, guilt/shame, selfishness.

Although this Alice Adams story has little action, a lot is achieved. A middle-aged man initially questions his decision to create a “diversion” for his first meeting with his daughter’s lesbian lover in the form of a weekend skiing trip with his girlfriend. Talking in their isolated cabin that night, the three women reveal things about themselves that not only bring the man closer to his daughter and girlfriend, but also help him understand his initial feelings (jealousy) toward his daughter’s partner. Themes include fatherhood, sexuality, deception, sexual assault, teenage pregnancy, jealousy, love.

This story by Alice Adams consists of several “snapshots” of the narrator’s encounters with fellow passengers on Greyhound buses. Recently divorced and facing potential homelessness, the woman’s self-esteem is at an all-time low. Taken in by an overbearing friend, her life has deteriorated into a daily grind. Faced with an inter-city bus commute morning and evening, the situations she encounters and people she meets awaken her to a whole new world. For perhaps the first time in her life, she begins to act independently and step out of her comfort zone. Themes: isolation, insecurity, friendship, dependency, anxiety/fear, personal growth.