Collected Stories

Grace Paley’s classic collection of stories—“funny, stylish, eccentric” (New York).

The Collected Stories demonstrates Grace Paley’s rich use of vernacular language and her extraordinary insight and compassion for her characters, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again in the blink of an eye. Her fiction is unwavering in its commitment to observational, honest attention, paid to the world and its people. Whether writing about the love and conflict between husbands and wives or the struggles of single mothers and passionately hopeful political organizers, Paley hears, unerringly, the rhythm of life as it is actually lived—and the emotions of all those trying to steady their hearts and minds to its inconsistent beat. Released in 1994, this classic volume signals an important moment in the growth of American fiction, just as it establishes Grace Paley herself as an enduring, inimitable moral voice.