Grace Paley Critical Essay | Critical Review by Margaret Randall

Critical Review by Margaret Randall

SOURCE: “Practicing the Art of the Possible,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 2, November, 1998, pp. 19-20.

In the following review, Randall offers a positive evaluation of Just As I Thought.

Just As I Thought is just the way it was, for Grace Paley and for many others loosely included in her generation. Paley herself describes the book as “a collection of articles, reports, and talks representing about thirty years of political and literary activity, with a couple of occasional glances over my shoulder into disappearing family and childhood.”

Paley is the quintessential storyteller. Her short stories have deepened our understanding of what it is like to grow up in a Jewish socialist immigrant family in the Bronx, seek justice as naturally as breath, and stand on all the rebel front lines of our time. Just As I Thought is their connective tissue: poems, articles, talks given...
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