A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry
by Grace Paley, edited
by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley, with an introduction by George Saunders.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 371 pp., $27.00
A decade after Grace Paley’s death, a new collection brings together fifteen of her most famous stories, with nineteen essays and thirty- four poems, all of them dealing with her characteristically large subjects: war, men, marriage, children, life and death. The fiction gathered in A Grace Paley Reader is peopled by lovable and profoundly eloquent characters living mostly in the Bronx, where Paley herself grew up. Her parents had come from Russia, and the family spoke Russian, Yiddish, and English.
Born in 1922, Paley went to public schools in the Bronx and then briefly attended Hunter College and the…
