It’s hard to strike a balance between the self-possession on which depend first principles—mutual responsibility, self-determination, and other such enduring commitments—with the humility to remain genuinely open to new comrades and new stimuli. Good art and good politics require both, or so Grace Paley helps me imagine.
During her long life and since, Paley has been well appreciated as one of the twentieth century’s most inventive writers of short fiction, though she only published three story collections over a span of twenty-five years. (Paley died in 2007 at the age of 84.) The great gift of the recently published A Grace Paley Reader (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which collects selected stories alongside Paley’s less widely read essays and poems, ...
It’s hard to strike a balance between the self-possession on which depend first principles—mutual responsibility, self-determination, and other such enduring commitments—with the humility to remain genuinely open to new comrades and new stimuli. Good art and good ...
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