Collected Stories - Hardcover

Hazzard, Shirley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374126488 ISBN 13: 9780374126483

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

Synopsis

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short-story collections―Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses―alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories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.

About this title

About the Authors

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) 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 and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.

Ms. Hazzard's novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1981) and The Great Fire (2003). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lived in New York, with sojourns in Italy.

Brigitta Olubas is a professor of English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She published the first scholarly monograph of Shirley Hazzard’s writing and recently edited two volumes of Shirley Hazzard’s work: We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays and Collected Stories. Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life is her first biography.

Zoë Heller was born in London and lives in New York City. She was a columnist for London's Daily Telegraph, she has contributed to such publications as Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, The Independent, The Sunday Times (London), and The New Republic. She is the author of the novels What Was She Thinking? (Notes on a Scandal), The Believers, and Everything You Know. What Was She Thinking? was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374126488
• ISBN 13: 9780374126483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Olubas Brigitta