SOURCE: “Amazing Grace,” in New York, Vol. 27, No. 15, April 11, 1994, pp. 64, 67.

In the following review, Kirn comments favorably on Paley's fiction in The Collected Stories, though he notes that some of her later pieces are overly ideological.

Grace Paley’s short stories have a tenement noisiness: They make an unholy racket in the air shaft. In her characters' cramped Greenwich Village kitchens, the teakettle is always on, whistling over the screams of colicky babies and personal and political arguments conducted with say-it-don’t-spray-it verbal fury. Outside lies an orderly socialist cosmos of block, neighborhood, city, nation, planet. The city is New York—stoop-sitting, immigrant New York—and the planet is Earth, as in Earth Day. Earth’s fate is Paley’s great concern: God and Heaven are crazy man-talk, things to fight wars in the name of. Like her pamphleteering female narrators, the sort of folks who bug you...