Often seen as a writer's writer whose compressed, circuitous, tangential, and consequential stories are greatly admired by her peers for their concision and seemingly casual, spontaneous artistry, Paley achieves in her best works a complex sense of life's richness, cheerfully accepting human limitations while honoring our capacity to care, to grow, to act deliberately. Few contemporary writers are at once so tough-minded and open-eyed yet so optimistic--or perhaps generous--in assessing mankind. Few possess so much street savvy yet retain so much hope and wonder. It is as much for these qualities as for the writer's antic humor and her remarkable ear for the rhythms and inflections of city speech that her stories are memorable.
Grace Paley is thoroughly a product of New York City. She was born and grew up in the Bronx, was educated at city schools and colleges, and now lives in Manhattan and commutes to the suburbs to teach. Her father, Isaac Goodside, "M.D., artist, and storyteller" (according to the author's dedication in her second collection of stories), retired from his practice at sixty to concentrate on painting and was an important influence on his young daughter who as a child, like her Shirley Abramowitz of "The Loudest Voice," was a talkative youngster "absolutely entranced" by the conversation and oral tales of her family.
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