Terrible Indeed

From a post by Maud Newton: "Terrible news: The great Grace Paley, feminist, activist, and until today of our best living short story writers, has died." (Wikipedia, however, says the "news is unconfirmed".)

Here's a 1998 Salon interview: "You have to keep not giving a shit." And The King's English blog has an earlier post with an extract from an interview commenting upon the appeal of open-endedness in short stories.

Update: The NY Times obit: "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."