SOURCE: “Grace Paley: A Listener in the City,” in Washington Post Book World, April 17, 1994, pp. 3, 12.

In the following review, Baxter offers a positive evaluation of The Collected Stories.

Grace Paley’s stories have achieved something of a cult or classic status, and with good reason. Since their first appearance in book form in 1959 with The Little Disturbances of Man, they have been notable for their humor and urban grit, their quick-witted sadness, and for their voices. No one else’s stories sound like these. The stories don’t seem literary so much as colloquial socialist-democratic, spoken aloud on a street corner or a front stoop, to witnesses.

This book [The Collected Stories] brings together all 45 of them, from the first collection through the second, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, to the most recent, Later the Same Day, published in 1985. They are here without any appreciable changes, revision...