Genre: Fiction

Celebrated short story writer and poet Grace Paley died of cancer last August at the age of eighty-four. A lifelong activist, pacifist, and an early figure in the women’s rights movement in the 1960s, Paley was one of those writers who managed to combine a public life of frequent readings and appearances in support of a range of causes with work lauded for its artistic integrity. We interviewed Paley a little more than a year before her death at her home in Thetford.

The short stories of Tobias Wolff, collected in four books during the past three decades, derive much of their strength from what is left unsaid—but what is said is usually violent and almost always disturbing.