One of The New Yorker 's "Books We Loved in 2017" A Grace Paley Reader compiles a selection of Paley’s writing across genres, showcasing her breadth of work as well as her extraordinary insight and brilliant economy of words. "A writer like Paley," writes George Saunders, “comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up.” Best known for her inimitable short stories, Grace Paley was also an enormously talented essayist and poet, as well as a fierce activist. She was a tireless member of the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, the tenants’ rights movement, the anti-nuclear-power movement, and the Women’s Pentagon Action, among other causes, and proved herself to be a passionate citizen of each of her communities―New York City and rural Vermont. Praise for A Grace Paley Reader "A welcome new collection of [Paley's] short stories, nonfiction, and poems . . . You can take the Reader to a rally and feel galvanized by Paley's conviction, or you can take it to bed late at night and find pleasure and comfort in humane prose." ―Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker "This new collection reminds us that Paley, despite her view of herself as writer/housewife, was not so much a writer who drifted onto political subjects from time to time; she was a full-time activist and moral leader who happened to be gifted at writing . . . Among the many pleasures of Paley’s work is the reassurance it offers that, just as we survived the events of those years, by analogy, we may yet survive the things that menace us now . . . It’s hard to think of another writer who has been admired for her virtuous, cheerful, and positive character as much as for her work." ―Diane Johnson, The New York Review of Books "If the Reader was intended as a memorial, published a decade after her death, it now seems more pressing―a necessary antidote to the current demoralization of the American left and the disorientation of what remains of the country’s center. . . Of the voices of mid-century American radicalism, few could ever make perseverance seem so vital.” ―Nicholas Dames, The Atlantic "Grace Paley may be the most underrated of New York twentieth-century writers . . . Paley became a knower of women, a conscious feminist, and a writer all at once . . . There are many generous writers, and many who cared more for living and writing and their families than they cared for fame. But of all these Grace Paley is one of the very best, which A Grace Paley Reader knows." ―Joseph Livingstone, New Republic "[ A Grace Paley Reader ] reminds us that Paley the short-story writer was also Paley the activist, the pamphleteer, the poet, the community organizer, and the committed leftist . . . A Grace Paley Reader helps to return the writer to her historical moment, to the specific conditions that shaped her life as an artist and activist . . . Her fiction was more than just empathetic: It not only sought to understand the world from the point of view of others, but also insisted on how integral this sense of connection was to the work of radical politics." ―Maggie Doherty, The Nation "[ A Grace Paley Reader is] the kind of retrospective that, in an era in which plot has given way to character, reveals the vital scope of [Paley's] influence.” ―Megan O'Grady, Vogue (Must-Read Books of Spring 2017) "The new A Grace Paley Reader, edited by Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley and introduced by George Saunders, makes accessible the writings of a woman who lived a life of tenacious and peaceful resistance. Divided into three sections, Paley’s stories, essays, and poems convey distilled wisdom gained from a lifetime of fighting for what she believed . . . her voice is an especially important one now. The issues of her time are the issues of our time . . . A Grace Paley Reader contains a sampling of the wisdom that one woman gleaned from not taking the easy way out." ―Jerusha Joy Emerson, Los Angeles Review of Books “The nice thing about A Grace Paley Reader , aside from the reminder that now would be a good time to read Grace Paley (and it so happens that now is a really good time to reread, or read for the first time, her work, which is full of energetic struggle against tyrannies small and large), is that by bringing together a selection of her stories, nonfiction pieces, and poems, it illuminates the connections among them, along with the intertwinings of work and life . . . And the longer I’ve had it with me, the more I find myself identifying with a title that had at first seemed awfully studious. A Grace Paley reader: I’m glad to be one.” ―Karen Olsson, Bookforum "Lucky us that a generous selection of [Paley's] stories, essays and poems has been collected in the just-published A Grace Paley Reader. . . “How can we dislike ourselves when she loves us so?” Saunders asks. Paley never flinched from showing us what’s ugly in w