“Like all the greatest masters of the short story–Chekhov, Hemingway, Sholom Aleichem, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel–Paley had an uncanny genius for containing a world within a sentence. … Why did Paley never write a novel? At the beginning of her career, her first editor suggested it, and Paley later wrote, ‘I tried, for a couple of years. I failed.’ In a sense, the question is as absurd as asking why Chekhov never did, or Carver, or Borges.”