Search Results

“... How aptly named: Grace Paley. For ‘grace’ is perhaps the most accurate, if somewhat poetic, term to employ in speaking of this gifted writer who has concentrated on short, spare fiction through a career of nearly five decades. First published in 1959 with The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley immediately drew an audience of readers who were not only admiring but loving ...”

“... What can put you off Grace Paley’s stories is their charm. ‘An Interest in Life’ in the collection called The Little Disturbances of Man begins: ‘My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn’t right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.’ It is so scrupulously disarming an intro that it is bound to put people who like Joan Didion very much on their guard ...”

“... of stories is in much the same fix. I am speaking here of Mavis Gallant, Rachel Ingalls and Grace Paley, all ladies in a world where some of us try hard to be lads,1 and short stories written by ladies are little different from shoes: they need breaking in. During the course of the past two months, I hobbled dutifully between my various estates ...”

“... of the few accounts of women’s lives in which that notion feels utterly foreign is the work of Grace Paley, where the typewriter sits on the kitchen table and single mothers do their political organising at the playground. You don’t have a story, Paley warned her writing students, if you’ve left out ‘money and ...”

“... place. Not so much in the original line as in all the echoes and shades and turns and pivots.’ Grace Paley, not included in the Paris Review volume, but very well represented in her Collected Stories,* which were discussed in the LRB (16 April 1998) by Joyce Carol Oates, and in Just as I Thought, a collection of ...”

“... than usual from their fathers’ standards. In this respect the most profound comment comes from Grace Paley’s father. He is a retired Jewish doctor; he is 86 years old and bedridden; he has to have frequent recourse to his oxygen cylinder; and he asks her to read him a story. She does more than that; she writes him one, and it is a ...”

“... networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel The Dispossessed in part on Bookchin’s early work); but Gary Snyder denounced him as a ‘thug’, the Situationists dismissed him as ‘spit in the horrible communitarian soup’ and one of ...”

“... Beard shares seriocomic territory not only with Moore, but with Lucia Berlin, Joy Williams and Grace Paley. The problem with charm, as Angela Carter wrote in a piece about Paley in these pages, is that it can be cloying (LRB, 17 April 1980). ‘You’re helping someone out for once,’ a mother says to her grown ...”

“... face – nothing out of the ordinary.’ Carver wants us to see what that face won’t show; what Grace Paley calls ‘the little disturbances’ lurking unseen in the ordinary. Altman, as he says, has always been interested in the ‘mystery and inspiration’ of human behaviour, and many of his characters in this movie start out pretty exotic: one ...”

“... support of imprisoned foreign writers and an op-ed in support of his Greenwich Village neighbour Grace Paley after she was arrested for protesting on the White House lawn. He liked to think of himself as ‘chipping away … a consistent effort, year in and year out’. This attenuated, not-unhopeful politics aligned with his aesthetic. Between the ...”

“... a dinner in St Luke’s Place. He was talking about Norman Mailer, whom Silvers and his partner, Grace Dudley, had just bumped into at Bayreuth. ‘I think Norman’s just spinning his wheels,’ he said. ‘He came up to Grace and me and started saying that Wotan is really a misunderstood guy, having to put up with all ...”

“... condensed in its footnotes), Clarke Garrett’s Respectable Folly, or several studies by Morton Paley. Mee adds to their findings several pamphleteers and preachers of his own discovery, the most interesting of whom is Garnet Terry. Terry was first a follower of and then a competitor with William Huntington, S.S. The ‘S.S.’ stood for Sinner Saved, and ...”

“... is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it does not justify without works, that grace does not depend upon sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine ordinance, yet those who have them not are in the same religious condition as those who have, – this is your safe man and the hope of the Church; this is what the ...”

“... in the New York Review compared the stories collected in Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? to Grace Paley’s; Parul Sehgal in the New York Times said comparisons to Paley are lazy. But they do seem apt. Collins’s stories, as Gornick says, are exercises in voice. What does it sound like when one person narrates ...”

“... the Clutter family murder case. ‘Weren’t you scared going into their cells?’ asks Babe Paley (played by Sigourney Weaver), speaking of the murderers while sipping a martini and purring for the Upper West Side. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s not as frightening as meeting Norman Mailer.’ It was a boring flight and I was trying and failing to make ...”