Here And Somewhere Else

Here two writers married to each other employ dramatically different narrative styles and voices to write politically. Often seriocomic, Grace Paley’s short fiction, including a previously uncollected New Yorker story, features characters “talking in their heads.” Robert Nichols, a master of the macabre incident described in surreal terms, sets his new stories in rural Vermont and Third World countries.

Grace Paley is a cooperative anarchist and combative pacifist. She has taught at Columbia University, Syracuse University, City College and Sarah Lawrence College. In 1989, she was named the first official New York State Writer. Her many publications include Later the Same Day, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, The Little Disturbances of Man, and Leaning Forward. Robert Nichols worked as a landscape architect and was involved in a nonprofit construction project for the teenagers of New York's Lower East Side. He was active in the antiwar movemnet and, more recently, in the antinuclear movement. He lives on a timber and hay farm with his wife, Grace Paley. Marianne Hirsch is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she also has an appointment in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is the author of Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory; Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism; and The Familial Gaze.