Description:
Collected Stories includes both volumes of the National Book Award-winning author Shirley Hazzard's short-story collections―Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses―alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories.
Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical send-ups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut. Hazzard's heroes are high-minded romantics who attempt to fit their feelings into the twentieth-century world of office jobs and dreary marriages. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendor of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her protagonists seek. Hazzard once said, "The idea that somebody has expressed something, in a supreme way, that it can be expressed; this is, I think, an enormous feature of literature." Her stories themselves are a supreme evocation of writing at its very best: probing, uncompromising, and deeply felt.Brief description:
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) is the author of novels, nonfiction, and story collections. Her 1970 novel, The Bay of Noon, was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and The Great Fire won the US National Book Award for Fiction, the Miles Franklin Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. She also wrote nonfiction, including two books based on her experiences working at the United Nations Secretariat. She was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand, Europe, and in the United States.
Review Quotes:
"This definitive collection of Hazzard's short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent...This impressive collection confirms their enduring stature."
-- "Times Literary Supplement (London)"