Best Selling Books by Grace Paley

Combining Grace Paley''s four previous collections and new unpublished work, this work traces the career of this direct, attentive, never predictable poet. Whether she describes the vicissitudes and pleasures of life in New York City or the hard beauty of her adoptive rural Vermont, whether she celebrates the blessings of friendship or protests against social injustice, her poems brim with the compassion and tough good humor that have made her stories and essays famous.

FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE AND NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, GRACE PALEY ''Grace Paley''s is exceptional'' KASIA BODDY, GUARDIAN ''Her unladylike gutsiness and friendliness are nonpareil'' EDMUND WHITE, OBSERVER ''They are stories full of the stories we all tell and live by, tall stories as well as short'' SALMAN RUSHDIE Here are all Grace Paley''s classic stories in one volume. From her first book The Little Disturbances of Man (1959) to Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), Grace Paley''s quirky, boisterous characters and rich use of language have won her readers'' hearts and secured her place as one of America''s most accomplished short story writers. Her stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal and political truths, her extraordinary capacity for empathy and her pointed depiction of the small and large events that make up daily life.

This rich and multifaceted collection is Grace Paley''s vivid record of her life. As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and "troublemaker" but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley''s inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.

One of The New Yorker''s "Books We Loved in 2017" A Grace Paley Reader compiles a selection of Paley''s writing across genres, showcasing her breadth of work as well as her extraordinary insight and brilliant economy of words. "A writer like Paley," writes George Saunders, "comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up." Best known for her inimitable short stories, Grace Paley was also an enormously talented essayist and poet, as well as a fierce activist. She was a tireless member of the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the tenants'' rights movement, the anti-nuclear-power movement, and the Women''s Pentagon Action, among other causes, and proved herself to be a passionate citizen of each of her communities—New York City and rural Vermont.

In these 17 stories, a small circle of intelligent, concerned friends cluster about a central figure, Faith, who listens, observes, questions, remembers, and records their lifelong attachments. In this selection of her work over the past 10 years, Paley''s themes have changed only as much as life''s constants change with the passage of time. Her characters are deeply involved with their parents, their lovers and friends, and their children, and the welfare of the wider community. In these stories we meet the neighborhood druggist with his tale of familial heartbreak; a father in Puerto Rico who cannot accept the loss of his child by kidnapping; a black woman who bemoans woman''s lot; a visitor from China who is concerned about how to raise children; a craftsman whose beautiful creation is stillborn. The whole collection is graced with the author''s warmth and aphoristic wit, her telling ear for dialogue, and her quintessential storytelling art. ISBN 0-374-18409-7: $13.95.

With firm authority Paley discusses topics of wide range, many of which she describes as personal discoveries. She includes politics and environmentalism, the family and human relationships, the impact of background and education, the moral importance of community, feminism and women''s liberation, the sexual self and role enforcement, America''s need for communality and women''s creative response to it, the art of teaching, and the importance of friendship.

Presenting mathematical ideas of peoples from a variety of small-scale and traditional cultures, this book humanizes our view of mathematics and expands our conception of what is mathematical.

A collection of short stories, originally published in 1974.

Just before her death in 2007 at the age of 84, Paley completed this wise and poignant book of poems. Mournful and nostalgic, but also ruefully funny and full of love, "Fidelity" is her passionate and haunting elegy for the life she was leaving behind.

Various stories and poems by Grace Paley and Robert Nichols.

    This first collaboration of two long-time feminist and antiwar activists is a wonderful melding of word and image that creates a powerful call for world peace. Paley''s poems and short fiction and William''s vivid watercolors depict the beauty and dignity of "ordinary" lives from El Salvador to the Bronx, from New Hampshire to Vietnam. Scenes and stories of domestic life, solitude, and nature are interspersed with heart-wrenching images of women widowed and children crippled by war and incarcerated by urban poverty, Here, too, are stories and paintings of protest, joyous and defiant.

“While nearly every Jewish female reader will find herself reflected here, the poignancy of these stories will be felt by readers of all ethnicities.”—Library Journal Chicken soup and Barbra Streisand, lost fathers and first dates, Hebrew school and Queen Esther, seders and seductions. In this insightful, original anthology, forty-five American Jewish writers explore the richness of their shared heritage, from the tragic to the trivial. In memoirs, fiction, and poetry new and favorite writers like Grace Paley, Amy Bloom, Vivian Gornick, and Laura Cunningham brilliantly reveal the challenges of coming of age as a Jewish woman in America today. What have we lost that our mothers and grandmothers had? Do we still feel close ties to family and community? Can we make a decent pot roast? This spirited collection is full of humor and wisdom, memory and affection—and there isn’t a Jewish girl (nice or otherwise) who won’t find herself reflected in these vibrant pages.

Like her celebrated short fiction, Paley''s poems are street-smart yet vulnerable, full of earthy observations and a refreshing bemusement; they display a wonderful ear for the rhythm of the speech of her native New York, where "talk is cheap but comes in variety." She "tells the story of the stories" told by children and grandmothers, which resonate "in the mind''s ear" as "talk talk talk/the tickling tongue/of strangers." These poems are rich with the fullness of everyday life: the doings of Paley''s Greenwich Village neighborhood, summers in Vermont, fulltime political activism, memories of family and friends. Paley''s wonderful economy with words recalls William Carlos Williams and the objectivist poets. ISBN 0-88448-098-4: $19.95.

Records one woman''s response to the love-hate relationships, inhibitions and selfconcerns of men and women

" Une douzaine de nouvelles qui sont d''une lecture désopilante. Des histoires de femmes de tous âges, racontées à la première personne par un écrivain qui sait raconter et qui s''est forgé un style tout à fait original et personnel. " Nicole Zand, Le Monde. " Avec Grace Paley, on ne saura jamais si le monde est un sujet de cafard ou de rigolade... Grace Paley, c''est Salinger au féminin. " Frédéric Ferney, Le Nouvel Observateur.