SOURCE: “Grace Paley's Book of the Ordinary,” in Gettysburg Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Autumn, 1994, pp. 696-702.

In the essay below, Pinsker evaluates the central themes and distinct style of Paley's fiction as evident in The Collected Stories.

Grace Paley's The Collected Stories is at once a cause to celebrate one of our country’s premier fictionists and an occasion to reconsider just what it is that makes her work so extraordinary. One could begin by pointing out that Paley is a painstaking writer (forty years of patient work has produced a mere forty-five stories) and then go on to suggest that The Collected Stories (which brings together in one volume her three previous collections—The Little Disturbances of Man [1959], Enormous Changes at the Last Minute [1974], and Later the Same Day [1985]) constitutes a rough chronicle of a certain slice of immigrant Jewish life in New York City during the decades...