Grace Paley (a"h)

I heard Grace Paley read a story (I forget which) at a conference on Women and Judaism at Yale when I was a senior in High School. I bought her book. (or maybe two of them) I became something of a fan, though I had sort of forgotten about that until I read that she died.

...In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud’s men had loved and left behind.
To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, hairpin rhetorical reversals and capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.

So go read some, perhaps...