anthofer 's review for:

The Collected Stories by Grace Paley

3.0

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The stories in here that work are jaw-droppingly amazing, and they're mostly in the first third. These are some fully-realized, badass women. Her last two short story collections are full of clunkers, especially around race, where her keen irony fails to be convincing and instead feels paranoid and kind of sad. I like that she is trying to talk about the change in her community from a white ethnic immigrant one to a black one because of city planning and white flight. It's important that she's not ignoring it. But oh man, the characterization in stories with mostly black characters is completely two-dimensional and the stories with white characters talking about black characters are unusually cruel.