SOURCE: “A Vent in the Park,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 3, 1994, pp. 3, 7.

In the following review of The Collected Stories, Eder offers a positive assessment of Paley's fiction, but notes that the collection contains several unexceptional pieces.

Anger does for Grace Paley what love did for Dante’s Beatrice; it makes her speak. But Paley’s anger, at its best, is no more a rant or preachment than Beatrice’s love was a burble. A few of these Collected Stories are thinly didactic with only one or two relieving grace notes; a few others are gnomic to the point of clenching and evaporating.

These are slips of a chisel that channels through hard rock. The channels gleam. Paley, now 71, is a feminist going back to the '50s when she started writing. Many of her stories evoke a radical New York Jewish milieu where the talk...