Description: "As a newcomer to [Paley's] work, I was frequently stopped in my tracks by a perfect phrase or image. The down side is that you can easily get so caught up in the language that you lose your grip on the story line. Great poetry (and these stories are great poetry) arrests us that way, which is why poems are typically brief. Paley's careful, intricate craftsmanship is brilliant in small doses but can get a little contrived and muddled in some of her longer stories. It may be necessary for complete comprehension to read them over and over again, but poetry was always meant to be lingered over."-Commonweal "The external facts of Ms. Paley's narratives are unremarkable. A woman runs into her former husband in the park, and they slip off to make love; a circle of women who met when they all had small children visit the one who is dying, and they talk about their grown children; an old couple undertake to raise their crazy daughter's child; a group of Americans sympathetic to mainland China are scolded by their Chinese tour guide for excessive curiosity and photography. These ingredients are the unremarkable clay and water of Grace Paley's time and place. What she has given them is the breath of art."-Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review "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 . . . 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 the essence of the changes each decade has brought, while also s20dramatizing the continuity of human emotions. And Paley can just knock us flat with the force of her spirited language."-Donna Seaman, Booklist "Paley hasn't written much, but the stories she has written are gems, and all of them (from The Little Disturbances of Man; Enormous Changes at the Last Minute; and Later the Same Day) are collected here. The narrator speaking at the end of one story, 'Wants,' demonstrates the virtues of Paley's prose: 'I wanted to have been married forever to one person, my ex-husband or my present one. Either has enough character for a whole life, which as it turns out is really not such a long time. You couldn't exhaust either man's qualities or get under the rock of his reasons in one short life.' Paley writes with a declarative elegance all her own, and her best characters display a dogged courage to be confused and curious about their lives."-Kirkus Reviews

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