Grace Paley Books In Order

Collections

  1. The Little Disturbances of Man (1959)
  2. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974)
  3. Later the Same Day (1985)
  4. Long Walks and Intimate Talks (1991)
  5. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley (1994)
  6. A Grace Paley Reader (2017)

Novellas

  1. Dreamer in a Dead Language (2020)

Anthologies edited

  1. Ergo (1992)

Non fiction

  1. Conversations with Grace Paley (1997)
  2. Just As I Thought (1998)

Collections Book Covers

Novellas Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Grace Paley Books Overview

Long Walks and Intimate Talks

This first collaboration of two long time feminist and antiwar activists is a wonderful melding of word and image that creates a powerful call for world peace. Paley’s poems and short fiction and William’s vivid watercolors depict the beauty and dignity of ‘ordinary’ lives from El Salvador to the Bronx, from New Hampshire to Vietnam. Scenes and stories of domestic life, solitude, and nature are interspersed with heart wrenching images of women widowed and children crippled by war and incarcerated by urban poverty, Here, too, are stories and paintings of protest, joyous and defiant.

The Collected Stories of Grace Paley

This reissue of Grace Paley’s classic collection a finalist for the National Book Award demonstrates her rich use of language as well as her extraordinary insight into and compassion for her characters, moving from the hilarious to the tragic and back again. Whether writing about the love and conflict between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived. The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

Conversations with Grace Paley

In this collection of interviews from 1978 to 1995 Paley elaborates on the many forces that have influenced her and her writing. In these conversations she reveals not only her triple lives as writer, mother, and political activist but also her perspectives which over the years have become precise and solid. With authority, distinctness, and relentless honesty she speaks out on contemporary issues. She discusses American conditions at large, particularly those that are being neglected or denied. With firm authority Paley discusses topics of wide range, many of which she describes as personal discoveries. She includes politics and environmentalism, the family and human relationships, the impact of background and education, the moral importance of community, feminism and women’s liberation, the sexual self and role enforcement, America’s need for communality and women’s creative response to it, the art of teaching, and the importance of friendship. Paley’s conversations, like her writings, are refreshingly candid and radically different from the contemporary American mainstream.

Just As I Thought

This rich and multifaceted collection is Grace Paley’s vivid record of her life. As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and ‘troublemaker’ but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley’s inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.

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