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jeremyhornik's review against another edition
5.0
And I don't even like short stories. She is so good. I saw her read at the Printer's Row Book Fair and got hooked. Every story is completely alive in its own way, all these odd little animals staring up at you. The one about her friend George, the inventor, is essentially about how I view my own self and my work.
kewlpinguino's review against another edition
4.0
4.5
Paley is great at crafting a world you can feel. I don't really know how to put it except that she evokes character and place consistently through her stories—whether they feature her recurring characters or not. She makes interesting stories in a real-feeling world without resorting to clichés, and is certainly a master of her form.
Paley is great at crafting a world you can feel. I don't really know how to put it except that she evokes character and place consistently through her stories—whether they feature her recurring characters or not. She makes interesting stories in a real-feeling world without resorting to clichés, and is certainly a master of her form.
kingkong's review against another edition
4.0
There's some really cool stories in here and then there are some 3 pages ones that you think what the hell is the point
mimi_means_secret's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
mirandacactusreads's review against another edition
5.0
I can feel Grace Paley's affection for her characters throughout the collection. Characters in each story often connected to each other, tied together in subtle ways. This collection is a mastery of personalities. I particularly enjoyed the stories involving Faith.
graywacke's review
5.0
46. The Collected Stories by Grace Paley
published: 1994
format: 386 page paperback
acquired: 2006, from my neighbor
read: Oct 19 - Nov 7 (with something of a break from Oct 29 - Nov 3)
rating: 5
Selected stories from three collections:
- [b:The Little Disturbances of Man|133620|The Little Disturbances of Man|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348368079s/133620.jpg|128716] (1959)
- [b:Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|133621|Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1311993358s/133621.jpg|128717] (1974)
- [b:Later the Same Day|133622|Later the Same Day |Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172025466s/133622.jpg|1190626] (1985)
It’s when trying to review a book like this, that I get a sense of how limited I am as a reviewer. There is a world of stuff to say about this book, a rich atmosphere with numerous different angles intersecting in one place…atmospheres. There is a lot here beyond the sentence, that isn’t overtly in the text and quotable, and that is difficult for me explain. I would say most of what leads me to give this book five stars is elusive to me, and not captured below.
Paley was something of a idealist whose perennial fascination with human passions, experience and disappointment evolves over the course of time. She has an interesting perspective on religion and life meaning, and either by intention or as a side-effect, shows how incongruous these thoughts are to life itself. All this can felt in these stories - three difference collections from three different eras (1959, 1974 and 1985). Each collection is the same in many ways, in style, in characters, who reoccur, and yet they are each different, distinctive, maybe of Paley’s apparent place. The most notable constant is Paley’s fictional alter-ego, Faith Darwin (a play on her own name and on itself), a divorcee, mother two young boys, who ages through her stories.
I think this collection serves as an interesting commentary on its time and the changes through its time, although it dwells on things that did not change - being a woman, being who you are, family and children and the transience of relationships, or really the failure of them, and of judgement.
- [b:The Little Disturbances of Man|133620|The Little Disturbances of Man|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348368079s/133620.jpg|128716] (1959)
Her first collection is striking by the raw power of its voices, and it is all voices. Each story has a narrator who has a lot to say and quickly. The stories are easy to get into, and quickly run through their material, the narrator having kind of exhausted our emotional stamina. I admired these hyper-powerful impatient stories. They “happen” quickly. The contents, the subjects touched on, struck me. I expected the baggage of Jewish culture, but I didn't expect all the sex and god and Christianity. This is great fun and powerfully memorable stuff.
wikipedia tells me the the collection wasn’t particularly successful, just another forgotten work by another unknown author. But it would be republished before her next collection was released.
- [b:Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|133621|Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1311993358s/133621.jpg|128717] (1974)
After Paley’s first collection, there was some kind of pressure on her to write a novel, instead a short stories. Having read that first collection, I find that a painful misfit of author and style. Alas that novel never happened. Instead, this collection came out, and it certainly feels as if this is the scraps of a novel.
The stories are longer, paced slower, less voice, more thoughtful and reflective but extremely intense at the sentence level. In the center story, Faith in a Tree, Faith sits up on a tree limb in playground, a mother watching her children and other parents and life around the playground. Each paragraph, each interaction has so much weight. In my favorite story, A Conversation with My Father she writes about story telling. Her father tells her: ”I would like you to write a simple story just once more…the kind like Maupassant wrote, or Checkov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” And after she tries with some back and forth he is moved by the "Poor woman, Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools.", not realizing he is capturing his daughter, but he also concludes, “I see you can’t tell a plain story. So don’t waste time.”
My thoughts on finishing, as I posted on Goodreads, were: “This collection feels like a failed novel, it’s the splinters that couldn’t come together. It was too intense. So she took out the sparkling stand alone pieces, shoved some other stories in the gaps and called it a collection. Of course I got that all wrong, but posting it anyway."
- [b:Later the Same Day|133622|Later the Same Day |Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172025466s/133622.jpg|1190626] (1985)
A different personality writes these stories. The author is older, toned down and so disappointed in life, but can’t get herself to say it. It worth taking a moment to think how different life was for a feminist and activist liberal in 1959 versus and 1985, and yet Paley takes no time to look at the positives, only life experience and aging, and disappointment creeps in.
All of her stories have a slim tether to really, breaking off in various ways without breaking the stories, but this collection goes the farthest, its the collection that most shows an author frustrated with the limits of story telling. It’s like the story isn’t saying enough, so she randomly grabs something nearby and incongruously tosses into the story in a desperate effort to make a point that can’t quite be said, but without breaking rhythm.
These stories lack the raw power of her first collection and even of her second, but maintain a complexity and develop a maturity. Who has Grace Paley become after all these times? She tells about Faith in 3rd person, bitterly and superficially through the voice of a racist old Jewish man, who recalls she was “once beautiful”: “She looks O.K. now, but not so hot. Well, what can you do, time takes a terrible toll off the ladies.”
I don’t know Paley’s life story, but her short story publication would stop here. The novel idea was entombed. She would publish poetry, scraps of which she had integrated into her short stories here, and she would remain an activist. She would publish this book of selected storied in 1994. But it seems the published story telling would go silent until her passing in 2007
published: 1994
format: 386 page paperback
acquired: 2006, from my neighbor
read: Oct 19 - Nov 7 (with something of a break from Oct 29 - Nov 3)
rating: 5
Selected stories from three collections:
- [b:The Little Disturbances of Man|133620|The Little Disturbances of Man|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348368079s/133620.jpg|128716] (1959)
- [b:Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|133621|Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1311993358s/133621.jpg|128717] (1974)
- [b:Later the Same Day|133622|Later the Same Day |Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172025466s/133622.jpg|1190626] (1985)
It’s when trying to review a book like this, that I get a sense of how limited I am as a reviewer. There is a world of stuff to say about this book, a rich atmosphere with numerous different angles intersecting in one place…atmospheres. There is a lot here beyond the sentence, that isn’t overtly in the text and quotable, and that is difficult for me explain. I would say most of what leads me to give this book five stars is elusive to me, and not captured below.
Paley was something of a idealist whose perennial fascination with human passions, experience and disappointment evolves over the course of time. She has an interesting perspective on religion and life meaning, and either by intention or as a side-effect, shows how incongruous these thoughts are to life itself. All this can felt in these stories - three difference collections from three different eras (1959, 1974 and 1985). Each collection is the same in many ways, in style, in characters, who reoccur, and yet they are each different, distinctive, maybe of Paley’s apparent place. The most notable constant is Paley’s fictional alter-ego, Faith Darwin (a play on her own name and on itself), a divorcee, mother two young boys, who ages through her stories.
I think this collection serves as an interesting commentary on its time and the changes through its time, although it dwells on things that did not change - being a woman, being who you are, family and children and the transience of relationships, or really the failure of them, and of judgement.
- [b:The Little Disturbances of Man|133620|The Little Disturbances of Man|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348368079s/133620.jpg|128716] (1959)
Lillie, don’t be surprised—change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused.
- - -
I was just tangent to the Great Circle of Life, of which I am one irrevocable diameter, when my mother appeared.
Her first collection is striking by the raw power of its voices, and it is all voices. Each story has a narrator who has a lot to say and quickly. The stories are easy to get into, and quickly run through their material, the narrator having kind of exhausted our emotional stamina. I admired these hyper-powerful impatient stories. They “happen” quickly. The contents, the subjects touched on, struck me. I expected the baggage of Jewish culture, but I didn't expect all the sex and god and Christianity. This is great fun and powerfully memorable stuff.
wikipedia tells me the the collection wasn’t particularly successful, just another forgotten work by another unknown author. But it would be republished before her next collection was released.
- [b:Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|133621|Enormous Changes at the Last Minute|Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1311993358s/133621.jpg|128717] (1974)
Just when I most needed important conversation, a sniff of the man-wide world, that is, at least one brainy companion who could translate my friendly language into his tongue of undying carnal love, I was forced to lounge in our neighborhood park, surrounded by children.
- - -
She put her two hands over her ribs to hold her heart in place and also out of modesty to quiet its immodest thud.
After Paley’s first collection, there was some kind of pressure on her to write a novel, instead a short stories. Having read that first collection, I find that a painful misfit of author and style. Alas that novel never happened. Instead, this collection came out, and it certainly feels as if this is the scraps of a novel.
The stories are longer, paced slower, less voice, more thoughtful and reflective but extremely intense at the sentence level. In the center story, Faith in a Tree, Faith sits up on a tree limb in playground, a mother watching her children and other parents and life around the playground. Each paragraph, each interaction has so much weight. In my favorite story, A Conversation with My Father she writes about story telling. Her father tells her: ”I would like you to write a simple story just once more…the kind like Maupassant wrote, or Checkov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” And after she tries with some back and forth he is moved by the "Poor woman, Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools.", not realizing he is capturing his daughter, but he also concludes, “I see you can’t tell a plain story. So don’t waste time.”
My thoughts on finishing, as I posted on Goodreads, were: “This collection feels like a failed novel, it’s the splinters that couldn’t come together. It was too intense. So she took out the sparkling stand alone pieces, shoved some other stories in the gaps and called it a collection. Of course I got that all wrong, but posting it anyway."
- [b:Later the Same Day|133622|Later the Same Day |Grace Paley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1172025466s/133622.jpg|1190626] (1985)
Once I thought, Oh, I’ll iron his underwear. I’ve heard of that being done, but I couldn’t find the cord. I haven’t needed to iron in years because of famous American science, which gives us wash-and-wear in one test tube and nerve gas in the other. Its right test tube doesn’t know what its left test tube is doing.
- - -
A few hot human truthful words are powerful enough, Ann thinks, to steam all God’s chemical mistakes and society’s slimy lies out of her life. We all believe in that power, my friends and I, but sometimes...the heat.
A different personality writes these stories. The author is older, toned down and so disappointed in life, but can’t get herself to say it. It worth taking a moment to think how different life was for a feminist and activist liberal in 1959 versus and 1985, and yet Paley takes no time to look at the positives, only life experience and aging, and disappointment creeps in.
All of her stories have a slim tether to really, breaking off in various ways without breaking the stories, but this collection goes the farthest, its the collection that most shows an author frustrated with the limits of story telling. It’s like the story isn’t saying enough, so she randomly grabs something nearby and incongruously tosses into the story in a desperate effort to make a point that can’t quite be said, but without breaking rhythm.
These stories lack the raw power of her first collection and even of her second, but maintain a complexity and develop a maturity. Who has Grace Paley become after all these times? She tells about Faith in 3rd person, bitterly and superficially through the voice of a racist old Jewish man, who recalls she was “once beautiful”: “She looks O.K. now, but not so hot. Well, what can you do, time takes a terrible toll off the ladies.”
I don’t know Paley’s life story, but her short story publication would stop here. The novel idea was entombed. She would publish poetry, scraps of which she had integrated into her short stories here, and she would remain an activist. She would publish this book of selected storied in 1994. But it seems the published story telling would go silent until her passing in 2007
Silence —the space that follows unkindness in which little truths growl.
laurenla's review against another edition
4.0
Zinging singing stories by Grace Paley who typed with a hand behind her back, raising children and the roof with the other hand. Somewhere on the Mrs Maisel spectrum but far stronger stuff. This collection is quite a bit, maybe start with one of the books it contains...
merixien's review against another edition
5.0
Bu kitap her ne kadar bir öykü seçkisi olsa da, okuduğunuzda bir roman taslağı okuyormuş hissi alıyorsunuz. New York’ta aşağı doğu yakası ve Bronx dolaylarında evlerin, ailelerin, geçmişlerin arasında dolaşıyor gibi şehrin ritmiyle uyum içerisinde öykülerde geziniyorsunuz.
Öykülerin ana merkezi Grace Paley’in alter-egosu olan Faith Darwin, hikayeler ise adeta onun ekseninde gelişiyor. Zaten yazarın, gerek Ukrayna’ya uzanan köklerinin, gerek yidiş geleneklerinin izlerinin, boşanmış kadın-anne figürünün ve ironik mizahın öykülerdeki yansımalarını kaçırmanız mümkün değil. Yarattığı kadın karakterlerine de kendinden parçaları dağıtıyor; hayatta kalmak ve hayatta olanı yıkmak zıtlığında ve bu zıtlıktan doğan yaratıcılığı günlük hayata, sokağa, düzene yansıtan; hayal kırıklıklarında zengin bir mutluluk bulup, yaşanan acının ve kederin ardından yükselen samimi bir rahatlama hissini itiraf edebilen kadınlar. Bu kadar yansıtmanın belki de doğal sonucundandır ki kitabı tamamladığınızda bir kadının hayatındaki ruhsal devinime/evrime şahit olduğunuzu hissediyorsunuz. Ben çok sevdim, eğer Amerikan edebiyatı seviyorsanız mutlaka okuyun.
“Hayat o kadar da şahane değil, Ellen” dedim. “Elimizde pespaye günlerden, pespaye erkeklerden, parasızlıktan, iki yakayı asla bir araya getirememekten, hamamböceklerinden, pazar günleri çocukları Central Park’a götürüp o iğrenç gölde kürek çekmekten başka hiçbir şey yok. Bunun nesi harika, Ellen? Hangi büyük kayıptan söz ediyoruz? Birkaç yıl daha yaşa. Çocukların ve bütün bu çerçöpün tamamının, dünyadaki tüm beş para etmez, fare deliği gibi şehirlerin ateşte kabarıp alev dalgaları halinde patlayışını gör...”
“Hepsini görmek istiyorum,” dedi Ellen.
Öykülerin ana merkezi Grace Paley’in alter-egosu olan Faith Darwin, hikayeler ise adeta onun ekseninde gelişiyor. Zaten yazarın, gerek Ukrayna’ya uzanan köklerinin, gerek yidiş geleneklerinin izlerinin, boşanmış kadın-anne figürünün ve ironik mizahın öykülerdeki yansımalarını kaçırmanız mümkün değil. Yarattığı kadın karakterlerine de kendinden parçaları dağıtıyor; hayatta kalmak ve hayatta olanı yıkmak zıtlığında ve bu zıtlıktan doğan yaratıcılığı günlük hayata, sokağa, düzene yansıtan; hayal kırıklıklarında zengin bir mutluluk bulup, yaşanan acının ve kederin ardından yükselen samimi bir rahatlama hissini itiraf edebilen kadınlar. Bu kadar yansıtmanın belki de doğal sonucundandır ki kitabı tamamladığınızda bir kadının hayatındaki ruhsal devinime/evrime şahit olduğunuzu hissediyorsunuz. Ben çok sevdim, eğer Amerikan edebiyatı seviyorsanız mutlaka okuyun.
“Hayat o kadar da şahane değil, Ellen” dedim. “Elimizde pespaye günlerden, pespaye erkeklerden, parasızlıktan, iki yakayı asla bir araya getirememekten, hamamböceklerinden, pazar günleri çocukları Central Park’a götürüp o iğrenç gölde kürek çekmekten başka hiçbir şey yok. Bunun nesi harika, Ellen? Hangi büyük kayıptan söz ediyoruz? Birkaç yıl daha yaşa. Çocukların ve bütün bu çerçöpün tamamının, dünyadaki tüm beş para etmez, fare deliği gibi şehirlerin ateşte kabarıp alev dalgaları halinde patlayışını gör...”
“Hepsini görmek istiyorum,” dedi Ellen.
bobbyman's review
funny
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0