Article: Passionate attachments The off-the-rack wisdom of Grace Paley's stories has earned her a quarter-century of devotion

GRACE PALEY

The Collected Stories.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 386 pp. $27.50.

Gail Caldwell is book editor of the Globe.

With her barley-soup intimacies and her West Village activism, Grace Paley is as New York as the Flatiron Building, and virtually as rare. Over the past 25 years her sad, funny, inimitable voice has chronicled a postwar urban milieu -- Jewish, leftish, life-or-death ironic -- that modern fiction would have been all the paler without. Her women work two jobs and dream about striking it rich on TV game shows; in real life, they're picketing in the park or arguing with the grocer over iceberg lettuce and Chilean plums. The men generally mean well, but they tend to ...

Related newspaper, magazine, and journal articles:

 
 
Newsweek Harper's Magazine The Washington Post Chicago Tribune Crain's Chicago Business PRNewswire Pediatric News The Nation Advertising Age The Economist (US) A FREE trial gives you access to over 80 million articles! Access over 6,500 publications with a FREE trial!