Grace Paley Book Club: the Duringmath

I would just like to share a picture of the food from last month's book club, or what was pretty much left after the attendees had had their fill (and had stopped yelling at me for leading the discussion poorly...just kidding! That pretty much didn't stop. My whoops.).



Here we have wine, cocktails, some of the borscht-that-ended-up-being-tasty-but-not-especially-borschty, the remains of the bagel platter (lox, whitefish salad, an assortment of cream cheeses, onion and tomato slices), and in the foreground: kugel.

Over the following week I ate ten pounds of kugel. That is all. See you in March!

'The Crooning and Combative Language of the Street'

You may not know this, but in a different life I was a poetry blogger. And one of the poets I wrote about was Grace Paley--her final collection, Fidelity, came out in 2007.

Here is a selection of audio of a Poets House tribute to Grace, including some very smart comments from A.M. Homes:

"I think of Grace and I think about how when I first read her stories I really couldn't understand them. They were lost on me and I didn't know why. And then I borrowed a record from the library--it was a recording of Grace reading 'Goodbye and Good Luck' and 'A Conversation with My Father' and suddenly listening to the sound of the reader's voice reading her own work, her intonation like an incantation made it all perfectly clear."

PS I can't take credit for the title of this post--it's a comment on Grace's work by the poet Jane Cooper.

Listen to Two Grace Paley Stories

NPR's Selected Shorts featured two Grace Paley stories last weekend. Neither are from January's book, The Little Disturbances of Man, but they're pretty emblematic of the sort of writing that Paley is know for--funny, slightly sad, and very wise.

The stories are "The Long-Distance Runner" and "A Conversation with My Father." You can find information about the show here, and listen to the stories by subscribing to the podcast.

January Book Club

I am blogging this live from Brooklyn, New York, the location of the next book club meeting, which will be held the 25th of this month. My neighborhood is called Gravesend, so I've selected a frighteningly appropriate book, The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley. It's about ghouls and witches! Just kidding, it's about Jews.

If you haven't started reading, you only have two weeks to go, but since the book is less than 200 pages long, NO PROBLEM! You can read that much in only 13 days. Or you can read one story and fake it, you faking fake.

Anyway, prepare yourself for some stuff that I'll make, like tea. Tea is definitely on the menu.

Aunt Hagar's Cram Session

With the next Brooklyn book club meeting in less than a week, you should be heading into your last fifty pages. Unfortunately, you're still stuck on page 12, fighting through "In the Blink of God's Eye."

That's why we got cramming! With limited time to get through 14 thirty-page stories, it's time to get your priorities straight. Figuring out which stories are superior and which are little more than filler, however, is virtually impossible without magic. Lucky for you I've already read the whole book, so I'm in a good position to recommend a good alternative to unreliable, scattershot methods like "random guessing" and "reading the stories in order."

If I had to do it again, and I only had time to read a third of the book, these are the stories I'd tackle first:

Old Boys, Old Girls

Bad Neighbors

A Rich Man

All Aunt Hagar's Children

Blindsided

For my money, those are the five best. If you have more time and want to dig a little deeper, here are another five that probably won't kill you:

Common Law

Spanish in the Morning

The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia

A Poor Guatelmalan Dreams...

Resurrecting Methuselah

And honestly, I would only read these last four if I wanted to capture Edward P. Jones at his least impressive:

Tapestry

In the Blink of God's Eye

Root Worker

Adam Robinson

Good luck, folks, and happy cramming! Hope to see you at 1:30 this Sunday.