Grace Paley: a lyricist of the domestic life

The good friend who told me about McSweeney  (see previous post) warmly recommended to me Grace Paley (that he discovered himself through McSweeney). She wrote above all short stories. “Totally delectable”. From what he said, as good as Carver, but much less desesperate, and her characters are not alcoholic insurance contractors of the Mid west, but rather New-York based jewish artists or leftist militants. It’s incisive, biting and sharping. Born in New York City in 1922, of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in the poor quarter of the Lower East Side, Paley emerged from the densely populated, fiercely individualistic Yiddish culture of which Anzia Yezierska (1885-1970) and Henry Roth (1906-1997) wrote in the 1920s and 1930s in such acclaimed novels as Bread Givers and Call It Sleep respectively (said J. Carol Oates).
Joyces Carol Oates, Philip Roth and Raymond Carver count among her fervent admirers (see their reviews of Paley’s work here , here and there). Susan Sontag too: ‘Grace Paley makes me weep and laugh – and admire. She is that rare kind of writer, a natural, with a voice like no one else’s: funny, sad, lean, modest, energetic, acute.’

In German, all I found was “Später am selben Tag. Geschichten”, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp. 1989, which suggests that some texts are not translated yet.