Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

A TIME "New Books You Should Read in August"The uncannily relevant, deliciously clear-eyed collected stories of a critically acclaimed, award-winning "American literary treasure" (Boston Globe), ripe for rediscovery-with a foreword by Elizabeth Strout.From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer-now ninety-one years old and at the top of her game-has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers, who "raises ordinary people and everyday occurrences to a new height." (Washington Post) These collected short stories-most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post, in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present-are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today.In the title story, a bystander tries to soothe a woman who seems to have cracked under the pressures of her life. And in several...