The Collected Stories (57 page)

Forgive you? She laughed. But she reached across the clutch. With her hand she turned my face to her so my eyes would look into her eyes. You are my friend, I know that, Faith, but I promise you, I won't forgive you, she said. From now on, I'll watch you like a hawk. I do not forgive you.

PRAISE FOR

GRACE PALEY

“Grace Paley makes me weep and laugh—and admire. She is that rare kind of writer, a natural, with a voice like no one else's: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.”

—Susan Sontag

“With her barley-soup intimacies and her West Village activism, Grace Paley is as New York as the Flatiron Building, and virtually as rare … Her sad, funny, inimitable voice has chronicled a postwar urban milieu—Jewish, leftish, life-or-death ironic—that modern fiction would have been all the paler without.”

—Gail Caldwell,
The Boston Sunday Globe

“Unlike many other short story writers, she gains in strength with each volume … [The story ‘Zagrowsky Tells'], and a handful of Paley's others, will stand up with the best short stories in English, anywhere, anytime.”

—Judith Dunford,
Chicago Tribune

“All over the world, in languages you never heard of, she is read as a master storyteller in the great tradition: People love life more because of her writing.”

—Vivian Gornick,
Women's Review of Books

“Ardent and ironic, sexual and funny, tuneful and candid, practical and idealistic, the stories of Grace Paley, delicious in themselves, also have a surprising historical significance … The external facts of Ms. Paley's narratives are unremarkable … These ingredients are the unremarkable clay and water of Grace Paley's time and place. What she has given them is the breath of art.”

—Robert Pinsky,
The New York Times Book Review