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“I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.

“Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.

“He said, What? What life? No life of mine.

“I said, O.K. I don’t argue when there’s real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.”

I first read these lines some 20 years ago. I had recently moved to a university in the U.S. Paley came to do a reading. Hooked, I went out afterwards and bought a copy of Enormous Changes. I read the short stories — and they were short — over and over again through the long and dark and cold Midwestern winter. Then (how different now), I knew nothing much of real disagreements or marriage or life. And still the lines above felt known to me. They struck with the force of experience — such force that when I again picked up a copy of Enormous Changes recently, I was amazed at how freshly remembered the lines felt. As if no time at all had passed since I last read them. If the quality of being memorable as well as deeply felt has anything to do with great literature, “Wants” is a great short story.

Grace Paley, who died recently at the age of 84, was born in 1922 into the Jewish community in New York, where she lived most of her life. She described herself as a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist”. During the Vietnam War, she was jailed for her participation in antiwar protests. More recently, she opposed the war in Iraq. She was not a prolific writer. At the end of her life she left behind three slim collections of short stories — Little Disturbances of Man (1959), Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and Later the Same Day (1985). Aside from these collections, she also published a few essays and volumes of poetry. But it is for her fiction that she was justly renowned and it is on the evidence of the short stories that Paley’s posthumous reputation will stand or fall.

Paley’s stories are typically told from the perspective of Jewish New York women living their lives as single mothers, as misunderstood children, as survivors in a world too full with the past, personal and historical. One such woman, Faith Darwin, is a recurrent character in many of her stories. Part of the reason I responded to Paley the way I did when I first read her is that her fictional voice seemed to me — and still seems — unlike any other American voice with which I was familiar. I had read Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller and Richard Wright when I first found Paley. Paley was nothing like these and other male American writers, different as they were from one another.

What I admire most in Paley’s stories is their ability to evoke a full and resonant world through the briefest of descriptions. Sometimes, as they say, less is more. A story like “Dreamer in a Dead Language,” only 18 pages long, is a world away from Bellow’s brash, exuberant first novel The Adventures of Augie March. Where Bellow follows the exploits of his hero Augie through 500 pages and more, Paley sketches her equally memorable heroine Faith Darwin (yes, there is great deliberation in that name, both first and last) in a few masterful strokes. The difference is one that highlights Paley’s quiet but compassionate understanding of the ordinary, and that is why today I admire Paley more than Bellow.

In another sense, of course, there is not really a world between Augie March and Faith Darwin. Both are of the same world — the world of America, otherwise known as the U.S. We, and indeed all too many Americans, like to think of the U.S. as a young nation, a frontier nation, a can-do nation, a nation with its face perpetually turned towards the future. But if you know your history, you know the burden of the past is as great in the U.S. as anywhere else. Some of the great American novels that I have come to value over the years are not those that sing the epic song of the New World (think of Columbus and what came after), but rather those that cast an unblinking eye on the cost of achieving that so-called New World. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is one such novel, and another is Toni Morrison’s Beloved. These are American novels about the burdensome past of America.

Grace Paley’s inimitable short stories, so different in style and sensibility from Faulkner or Morrison, are quintessential American fiction in this sense. In them you will find the American present assessed in the light of its past, with all its faults and glories. That she is able to do this in a manner that attends at one and the same time to the every-day trials and tribulations of her characters and the enormous weight of a larger history is part of her greatness as a writer.

When the heroine of “Wants” enters the library after her encounter with her ex-husband of 27 years, you know she is going in to figure out more than library dues. Yes, you are reading about an ordinary woman who is able to forget checked-out library books for 18 years. Certainly, there is great pleasure in seeing Paley evoke this woman so deftly. But you also know that Paley is writing about something more. In the little every-day disturbances of individual human beings can be found the great dislocations of the history of humankind.