The Collected Stories
Paley's stories are sui generis: politically ferocious, linguistically playful, rooted in the Jewish-American New York voice like no one else. She makes the domestic feel epic and the political feel intimate.
Several stories run pages of dialogue with no quotation marks at all, and one more reader admits it gets genuinely hard to tell who's speaking, calling it written “without a single use of quotation for the dialogue.” The stream-of-consciousness structure lets characters move through a scene with no formal introduction, which reads as confusing rather than just demanding, and most stories skip a real turning point, leaving even admirers of the craft to call the book “difficult to finish and uneventful.” One reader spent “trying to finish this book for over six months” before giving up past the three-hundred-page mark, blaming “fragmented plots and dialogues making them difficult to follow.” Even a fan of the Faith-centered stories admits the explicitly political entries land weaker, and the voice visibly shifts across the twenty-six years the three volumes span.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
