The Collected Stories

Paley, Grace

ISBN 10: 0374524319 / ISBN 13: 9780374524319

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995

A sound copy with only light wear. Overall a solid copy at a great price! Seller Inventory # BOS-K-09c-01546

Synopsis:

Here are all Grace Paley's classic stories in one volume. From her first book THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN (1959), to ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE (1974) and LATER THE SAME DAY (1985), Grace Paley's quirky, boisterous characters and rich use of language won her readers' hearts and secured her place as one of America's most accomplished short story writers. Her stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal and political truths, her extraordinary capacity for empathy and her pointed depiction of the small and large events that make up daily life.

Books included in the VMC 40th anniversary series include: Frost in May by Antonia White; The Collected Stories of Grace Paley; Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault; The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter; The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann; Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith; The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West; Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston; Heartburn by Nora Ephron; The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy; Memento Mori by Muriel Spark; A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Review: Paley is as clever a mimic as Philip Roth, as cheerfully zany and aleatory in her vision of New York as Christina Stead, as serendipitous as Donald Bartheleme, but her unladylike gutsiness and friendliness are nonpareil (Edmund White Observer)

This is a collection full of energy and stunning, quiet innovation ... it spills over with contempt, raucous humour, sadness and generosity. In it, life and language are synonymous, and there is no higher praise. What a wonderful book (Ali Smith)

An understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike (Philip Roth)

Grace Paley makes me weep and laugh - and admire. She is that rare kind of writer, a natural, with a voice like no one else's: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute (Susan Sontag)

These stories, brief and extended, burn with a high-energy commitment to the great work of being alive. They are stories full of the stories we all tell and live by, tall stories as well as short . . . And they are stories in which the whole of a world, its children, its dead, its furniture, its snacks, is lovingly and unsentimentally named. Named, and not forgiven. (Salman Rushdie)

Grace Paley is one of the great writers of voice of the last century. There's an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase-or-sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another ... A writer like Paley comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up (George Saunders)

Grace Paley's work makes the novel as a form seem virtually redundant. Each one of her stories has more abundant inner life than most other people's novels . . . Her prose presents a series of miracles of poetic compression (Angela Carter)

Grace Paley is the most intelligent, generous, incorruptible writer I ever knew. Her daughter says, "I learned from her that precision requires a warm eye, not a cold one," and so did we all. Keen wit and real modesty seldom occur in such happy alliance. Who she was is what she writes. She never shows off, never bullies. She asks us what do you think about this? and is interested in our answer. She takes nothing for granted and everything as worth rethinking. Her writing on social issues remains timely because it was never superficial; she held understanding more useful than judgment. Very few writers can match the offhand voice, with its unmistakable oral cadence, in which her poignant, funny short stories are told. (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Collected Stories
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: 1995
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good