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Pick a pair of perfect Paleys, that’s the recipe for this program of SELECTED SHORTS. The late Grace Paley can be said to have been the Founding Mother of our series, allowing her work to be featured in our earliest programs, hosting short story evenings, and urging recommendations to us of new and still unsung writers. Paley influenced a generation of young writers in New York and at the Provincetown Fine Arts Workshop, and her many literary honors, in a writing career spanning more than half a century, included the Rea Award for the Short Story.

In a number of her works, which include the collections Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Collected Stories (a Pulitzer Prize nominee), Paley writes in the voice of a fictional alter ego, Faith. Both stories on this program--which is our ave atque vale to our old friend and colleague—are Faith stories. First Laura Esterman reads “The Long Distance Runner,” a fantastical account of Faith’s encounter with the people who now live in her old apartment.

Another recurring theme of Paley’s fiction was her loving but challenging relationship with her émigré father, and our second work, “A Conversation with My Father,” has Faith’s feisty parent scolding the author for her non-traditional narrative style. The actress who starred in the Broadway drama “Night Mother,” Anne Pitoniak, treats us to Paley’s attempts to “just tell a simple story.”

“The Long-Distance Runner,” by Grace Paley read by Laura Esterman
“A Conversation with My Father,” by Grace Paley read by Anne Pitoniak

For additional works featured on SELECTED SHORTS, please visit Symphony Space