The Collected Stories [Hardcover]

Grace Paley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1994

An introduction by Paley accompanies a comprehensive collection of short fiction by the award-winning author of Later the Same Day, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and The Little Disturbances of Man. 15,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This collection brings together Paley's three previous volumes of stories: The Little Disturbances of Man (1959; Penguin, 1985. reprint), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (Farrar, 1974), and Later the Same Day ( LJ 1/86). Paley's inventive style and her funny, feisty, irreverent characters create vivid slices of life. Her stories often concern women coping with children alone, as in "An Interest in Life," where a woman has an affair after her husband deserts her. A continuing character, Faith, is a divorced woman with children who gets her emotional support from her women friends. In "Faith in a Tree," Faith's interests expand to include politics after she witnesses an antiwar demonstration in the park. In "A Conversation with My Father," a writer explains that even a story's terrible ending is not final--the characters could still change. This possibility of hope permeates all Paley's stories, creating a rich treasury of unexpected pleasures and revealing truths. Essential.
- Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Paley is a member of that select breed of writers who become masters of the short story and resist the pressure to produce a novel. This volume gathers together more than 30 years' worth of stellar stories from Paley's best-known collections, The Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985). This rich compilation presents us with the full spectrum of Paley's voices as well as her observations and interpretations of urban family life and a society that thrives on oppression. An outspoken pacifist, feminist, and self-described "cooperative anarchist," Paley can no more keep her political beliefs out of her fiction than a plant can keep from releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, but the story always comes first. Her cast of stubborn, opinionated, earthy, smart, sassy, and robust characters demand it. Paley writes just as effectively from a man's point of view as a woman's, discerning the ironies of everyone's predicaments, but she writes most poignantly about the frustrations of women stuck in the rigidity of gender roles. Paley's people either have moxie, or tremendous endurance. They're frank about lust, angry about money, and always ready for a good argument. These staccato tales of the city capture of the essence of the changes each decade has brought, while also dramatizing the continuity of human emotions. And Paley can just knock us flat with the force of her spirited language. Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 386 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374126364
• ISBN-13: 978-0374126360
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #416,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars clearly female, uniquely brilliant, August 12, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Collected Stories (Hardcover)

Nearly every book I've read on aging women has included a reference to Grace Paley's "The Long Distance Runner." Here it is, along with 43 other stories Paley has written since the beginning of her writing career. Anticipating an anthology of _stories_, the Paley-ignorant reader is bewildered, awed, and delighted in turns as Paley's darkly metaphorical tales reveal her clever humor and, ultimately, her unflagging hope for humanity. Using common language with an uncommon twist, Paley's descriptions cause the reader to laugh with familiarity: "The table was the enameled table common to our class, easy to clean, with wooden undercorners for indigent and old cockroaches that couldn't make it to the kitchen sink." "The Long Distance Runner" is a powerful allegory about menopause, that mystical time in a woman's life when so much more is happening than the simple cessation of menstrual flow. Paley attributes her success as a writer to the wonderful luck of the birth of the women's movement, which coincided with the publication of her first stories.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars People say short stories are dying..., May 20, 2001

By 

coolhound "coolhound" (nyc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Collected Stories (Paperback)

This collection of short fiction demonstrates just how horrible that would be. Grace Paley's work is amazing in its lyrical sound - at some moments sparse, at others extremely detailed, and always poignant. Stories about single mothers, about women visiting elderly parents in odd nursing homes, about families in general, and how the world works (and worked). It is hard to find a good short story writer... Somewhere between a novel (overly stuffed with words) and a poem (too highly styled and formatted to say what it really wants to say) a short story, when good, can come closest to literary perfection - you can say all that you want to say, but only that. Grace Paley's stories come close to that perfection. She is one of the most underappreciated great authors out there.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ooh, what delicious writing this is, October 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Collected Stories (Paperback)

Grace Paley has that rarest of gifts: a voice all her own. Funny, tough, and compassionate, this voice mirrors her characters, some of whom (especially the eponymous Faith) are people you wish you knew, or already do. At every turn, her characters avoid stereotype, something most self-professed "political" and "feminist" writers fail to do. Three volumes of stories are collected here; the first volume, I think, is the richest. Here Paley is content to represent the hilarious, yet tragic, travails of her characters. In the later volumes, aside from being more experimental in form, she tackles overtly political themes. But the voice never fails her, and even the most dogmatic, contrived story is lifted above the ordinary. Paley never loses her compassion for mankind. At the end of her career, this was her abiding them: when faced with cynicism or compassion, she always extended the latter to her fellow human beings. These are great, tough stories, worthy of reading several times over. Please buy this collection and spread the word. Paley is that dying breed -- an American original.