New Releases by Grace Paley

“While nearly every Jewish female reader will find herself reflected here, the poignancy of these stories will be felt by readers of all ethnicities.”—Library Journal Chicken soup and Barbra Streisand, lost fathers and first dates, Hebrew school and Queen Esther, seders and seductions. In this insightful, original anthology, forty-five American Jewish writers explore the richness of their shared heritage, from the tragic to the trivial. In memoirs, fiction, and poetry new and favorite writers like Grace Paley, Amy Bloom, Vivian Gornick, and Laura Cunningham brilliantly reveal the challenges of coming of age as a Jewish woman in America today. What have we lost that our mothers and grandmothers had? Do we still feel close ties to family and community? Can we make a decent pot roast? This spirited collection is full of humor and wisdom, memory and affection—and there isn’t a Jewish girl (nice or otherwise) who won’t find herself reflected in these vibrant pages.

At long last, here are all of Grace Paley''s classic stories collected in one volume. From her first book, The Little Disturbances of Man, published in 1959, to Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985), Grace Paley''s quirky, boisterous characters and rich use of language have won her readers'' hearts and secured her place as one of America''s most accomplished writers. Grace Paley''s stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal and political truths, by her extraordinary capacity for empathy, and by her pointed, funny depiction a the small and large events that make up city life. As her work progresses, we encounter many of the same characters and revisit the same sites, bearing witness to a community as it develops and matures, becoming part ourselves of a dense and vital world that is singular yet achingly familiar.

Like her celebrated short fiction, Paley''s poems are street-smart yet vulnerable, full of earthy observations and a refreshing bemusement; they display a wonderful ear for the rhythm of the speech of her native New York, where "talk is cheap but comes in variety." She "tells the story of the stories" told by children and grandmothers, which resonate "in the mind''s ear" as "talk talk talk/the tickling tongue/of strangers." These poems are rich with the fullness of everyday life: the doings of Paley''s Greenwich Village neighborhood, summers in Vermont, fulltime political activism, memories of family and friends. Paley''s wonderful economy with words recalls William Carlos Williams and the objectivist poets. ISBN 0-88448-098-4: $19.95.

    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.

" Grace Paley est une magicienne irrésistible dans le comique comme dans le pathétique, car elle les marie d''une manière indissoluble. " François Bott, Le Monde.

Whether writing about relationships, sexy little girls, loving and bickering couples, angry suburbanites, frustrated job-seekers, or Jewish children performing a Christmas play, Grace Paley captures the loneliness, poignancy, and humor of the human experience with matchless style in this book of short stories. "Fresh and vigorous...Mrs. Paley’s view of life is her own."--The New Yorker "The glad tidings from this reviewer’s corner are of the appearance of a [writer] possessed of an all-too-infrequent literary virtue--the comic vision."--The New York Times

Presenting mathematical ideas of peoples from a variety of small-scale and traditional cultures, this book humanizes our view of mathematics and expands our conception of what is mathematical.