Grace Paley's short stories are vivid examples of twentieth-century American local color and regional sensibility. Populated by many a hue and caste of New York citizen and narrated in a supple, percussive urban demotic, Paley's sketches and tales good-naturedly celebrate the toughness and endurance, the humor and resiliency of the human spirit. In both of her books, the author delves with comedy and sympathy into the anguish, perplexity, and mixed joy and frustration of what the title of her first collection of stories terms "the little disturbances of man."

Paley's fictions are sometimes quite brief. Her plots are often gestures, anecdotes, or monologues, mere snatches of the loneliness of the petty triumphs and the pale ordinariness of the losses and tragedies of neighborhood life. But more than from plot, the momentum and liveliness of Paley's stories derive from their telling, the bright oral tonality and often wildly funny...