AJC reports on the death of author Grace Paley who wrote short pieces about “the history of everyday life”, according to a NYT interview a few years ago.
Paley’s output was modest, about four dozen stories in three volumes: “The Little Disturbances of Man” (Doubleday, 1959); “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and “Later the Same Day” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed at once to be surgically spare and almost unimaginably rich.
Her “Collected Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. (The collection was reissued by Farrar, Straus this year.) From 1986 to 1988, Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also a past poet laureate of Vermont.
Paley (born Grace Gutseit in the Bronx, daughter of immigrants) was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women; mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers in all their dailiness. She often focused on single mothers, whose days were a mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.
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