Grace Paley Centennial

Selected Shorts

Symphony Space

Arts, Fiction, Books, Society & Culture

4.4 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2023

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host Meg Wolitzer shares our tribute to the influential and outspoken New Yorker Grace Paley, who would have turned 100 in 2022. Her emphasis on friends, family, and doing the right thing are evident in the three stories on this show. In “Wants,” a woman has a chance encounter while returning a lot of overdue library books. It’s read by Adina Verson. Two old friends work their way from childhood to middle age in “Ruthy and Edie,” read by Rita Wolf. And we meet a woman with a wonderfully checkered past in “Goodbye and Good Luck,” read by Joanna Gleason. Backstage interviews with Wolf and Gleason are featured.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
0:07.0	Equality, community, and how to deal with those library books you checked out 18 years ago
0:12.7	and somehow never returned.
0:15.4	Coming up on Selected Shorts, celebrate the fiction of the Great Grace Paley with me,
0:20.3	your host, Meg Wallitzer.
0:23.0	You're listening to Selected Shorts, where our greatest actors transport us through the
0:27.3	magic of fiction, one short story at a time.
0:39.3	Does the name Grace Paley ring a bell?
0:41.8	If so, maybe you know she would have turned 1222.
0:45.9	But even if you don't know her, sit tight, this is worth sticking around for.
0:50.5	Grace Paley is one of those quintessential New York writers.
0:54.6	She was born in the Bronx in 1922, went to Hunter College, and lived in Greenwich Village
0:59.9	with her husband and two children.
1:02.4	Between writing, parenting, getting involved in the anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-racist
1:07.4	and feminist movements, well, she had a lot going on, and each of her passions kept her
1:12.6	anchored to the world in a different way.
1:15.8	Paley wrote three collections of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man in 1959, followed
1:21.4	by enormous changes at the last minute in 1974, and later the same day in 1985.
1:28.7	Just three books, and yet her impact has been profound.
1:32.5	Like pretty much all the writers I know, I love Grace Paley's work.
1:36.5	She was a real presence in the world of literature, and also served as a model of how to be a
1:41.4	good citizen.
	...

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