Collected Stories
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ISBN10: 1250800323
ISBN13: 9781250800329
Trade Paperback
368 Pages
$18.00
CA$24.50
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.
Reviews
Praise for Collected Stories
"In Collected Stories, we see Hazzard practicing the floor routines of her later novels, sticking all the landings if not always having yet worked out the full choreography. The erudite similes and lethally precise adjectives are there, as are the astute observations about domestic phenomena . . . The intellectual thrill of her work arises from her ability to describe the small, constituent particles of emotional matter we typically consider irreducible."—Alice Gregory, The New Yorker
"Hazzard’s stories are shrewd, formal and epigrammatic. One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them . . . Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: 'We are human beings, not rational ones.'”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
"Hazzard manages to convey that there’s much more beyond the platitudes we tell ourselves, that human emotions—love, pain, jealousy, grief—are never as neat and manageable as we tell ourselves . . . Hazzard understood the human condition in all its contradiction, all its messiness, like few others. Collected Stories is certainly essential for admirers of the author, but it’s also a wonderful read for anyone who loves fiction that delights and enlightens, challenges and rewards."—Michael Schaub, The Boston Globe
"This new volume offers fans of Hazzard’s much-loved, prize-winning novels, The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, a chance to look back at her development as a writer. And what an exquisitely polished writer she was, at once serious and bitingly funny, a master of both the plush, well-rounded sentence and the oblique takedown . . . To dismiss these revelatory, human stories as fusty relics would be merciless—and unaccountable."—Heller McAlpin, The Los Angeles Times
"To read the rigorous formalism of Shirley Hazzard . . . is to discover the apostate’s pleasure upon returning to the faith. Her works—whole, cruelly exacting, consoling in their grace and precision if not their ultimate outcomes—are monuments to fiction’s disappearing pieties . . . She is the master of the offhand, psychologically acute detail that reveals a character’s diminished circumstances, be they moral, sexual, or material."—Dustin Illingworth, The Nation
"This definitive collection of Hazzard’s short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent . . . Hazzard’s stories . . . built her early reputation. This impressive collection confirms their enduring stature."—Dinah Birch, The Times Literary Supplement
"The stories collected here offer a perfect introduction to her astringent sensibility . . . Sharply intelligent, nuanced, precise, and subtly hilarious.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
CLIFFS OF FALL
THE PARTY
The Fergusons’ door opened on a burst of light and voices, and on Evie’s squeal of surprise—quite as if, Minna thought, we had turned up uninvited. Evie kissed her.
“Our shoes...
About the author
Shirley Hazzard; Edited by Brigitta Olubas; Foreword by Zoë Heller
