Tell Me a Riddle
First published in 1961, Tell Me a Riddle gathers four stories that established Tillie Olsen as one of the most important American writers of her generation. The collection opens with I Stand Here Ironing, a mother's anguished interior monologue about a daughter the world has shaped without her. Hey Sailor, What Ship and O Yes follow working class characters across the color line in 1950s San Francisco, while the title novella tracks an aging Jewish immigrant couple as the wife, dying of cancer, refuses to play the role of the dutiful grandmother and instead reaches back to the radical hopes of her youth. Olsen's prose is dense, musical, and deeply political, attentive to the rhythms of speech, labor, and silence. Tell Me a Riddle won the O. Henry Award for best American short story and remains a foundational text for feminist and working class literature.
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What you might want to know about Tell Me a Riddle
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Tillie Olsen's classic collection of four stories about working class women, immigration, and the inner lives of mothers.
It draws on Olsen's parents' generation of Jewish radical immigrants but is a work of fiction.
I Stand Here Ironing is one of the most widely anthologized stories in American literature.
Tell Me a Riddle was written by Tillie Olsen, published in 1961 by Bantam Doubleday Dell.
Tell Me a Riddle is 121 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Tell Me a Riddle takes most readers 2 to 3 hours to finish.
Tell Me a Riddle is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.