The Little Disturbances of Man

Eleven stories of men and women at love, set in the Bronx and the Village. The Little Disturbances of Man introduced the world to Grace Paley’s utterly distinctive voice: wry, warm, compressed, and alive with the cadences of New York speech.

Why Start Here

This is where Paley’s fictional world begins. The stories are short enough to read in a sitting, but they stay with you for years. “Goodbye and Good Luck” opens the collection with the monologue of an aging aunt recounting her love affair with a Yiddish theater actor, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: comic, heartbreaking, and deeply human, often in the same sentence.

Paley wrote slowly and published rarely. It took her fifteen years to produce her next collection. Starting with this debut means starting with the book that announced a major talent, and meeting the characters, especially the semi-autobiographical Faith Darwin, who reappear throughout her later work. If you read nothing else by Paley, read this, and you will understand why writers from Donald Barthelme to George Saunders have cited her as an influence.

What to Expect

Very short stories, most under fifteen pages, written in a voice that sounds like someone talking to you across a kitchen table. The prose is deceptively simple. Paley packs enormous emotional range into minimal space, and her humor is constant but never flippant. These are stories about ordinary lives treated with extraordinary attention.