A review by jimmylorunning
Later the Same Day by Grace Paley

4.0

Enigmatic stories, not light but containing lightness. Very funny. A sympathetic humor. The short ones are very strange. Off-kilter occurences following their own logic, sometimes reminds me of Jane Bowle's stories, but with broader concerns. Politics is in there a lot, the stories are more about the ways people deal with politics in their own lives, rather than trying to make any political points. I like her voice a lot, and she has recurring characters. Faith and her friends Ruth and Ann and Susan. She doesn't use quotation marks to set off dialogue and it can be really confusing when a lot of people start talking, but she does dialogue well, and her stories are sometimes hard to follow but they go in these weird directions without any kind of explanation. I like that. I also like, in her shorter stories, where she doesn't try for any kind of realism. Like in "At That Time, or The History of a Joke".