The Collected Stories

Someone suggested I read this collection and at first I doubted I would like it, I skimmed through it and it didn't grab me but since I promised the person I would read it, I finally did. I couldn't have been more wrong about this collection- it's very well written and interesting. The subject matter of the stories might not be for everyone but I really was surprised to see how wrong I was and definitely should have given this an earlier chance. Paley's writing is clear and takes you through even parts where you might be confused. It is unusual to what I usually read but it grew on me and now I want to read more of Grace Paley's work. Her stories definitely have a period feel that might challenge certain readers but if you give it a chance, you just might enjoy it as I did.

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.

ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE is a perfect collection of perfect stories. It's too bad the reader from Marietta, GA spews forth such ignorant bile about such a wonderful writer.

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.

Word for word, there's more going on in one of Grace Paley's small masterpieces than in any hefty bestseller on-shelf today. With a single phrase, she can sum up the fullest life, skewer the truth at the heart of things, or send a story off in a direction that surprises in the most satisfying ways. This is an artist who creates characters who live, who delight, who enrich us for knowing them, however briefly. In my favorite story, "A Conversation with My Father," Paley provides a summation of her aesthetic: "Everyone, real or invented," the story tells us, "deserves the open destiny of life." In this collection, you will find a fearless, insightful, & inventively-entertaining explorer as your guide to such "open destinies." It's all here: romance, satire, experimental art, drama that's almost epic, humane warmth. This is literature at its freshest, not because it's new, but because it is timeless