The collected stories

Grace Paley was a master when it came to dialogue and making simple acts of living into something larger. "The Little Girl" is one of the most disturbing yet perfectly crafted stories I've ever read.

A distinctive voice--funny, with great rhythm. Probably not for everyone.

Nearly every book I've read on aging women has included a reference to Grace Paley's "The Long Distance Runner." Here it is, along with 43 other stories Paley has written since the beginning of her writing career. Anticipating an anthology of stories, the Paley-ignorant reader is bewildered, awed,

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and delighted in turns as Paley's darkly metaphorical tales reveal her clever humor and, ultimately, her unflagging hope for humanity. Using common language with an uncommon twist, Paley's descriptions cause the reader to laugh with familiarity: "The table was the enameled table common to our class, easy to clean, with wooden undercorners for indigent and old cockroaches that couldn't make it to the kitchen sink" (p. 250). "The Long Distance Runner" is a powerful allegory about menopause, that mystical time in a woman's life when so much more is happening than the simple cessation of menstrual flow. Paley attributes her success as a writer to the wonderful luck of the birth of the women's movement, which coincided with the publication of her first stories.

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She has no equal

There were many excellent value-laden statements and actions in this book, but the presentation was such that I did not understand most of it. There was also too much repetition with slight changes.