Grace Paley, The Collected Stories ***

I came to Grace Paley's Collected Stories with high expectations. Paley has a reputation as "one of the great writers of voice of the last century." and that reputation comes almost entirely from her stories. I anticipated a deep sense of character and of place (mid-century Jewish Bronx).

Her stories are far more experimental than I expected. The subjects are mundane and realistic, but the style is knotty and literary. They strike me as being very much like poetry, not in the sense of being lyrical but in being concentrated and built around images rather than narrative. And like poetry, the stories require concentrated attention from the reader -- and often go over my head.

The prose is filled with unique perspectives and interesting turns of phrase, but alas I will forget them because the stories rarely kept my attention or built to a larger point.