Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia and travelled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of sixteen, she was engaged by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China. At twenty, she moved to New York, working for the United Nations throughout much of the 1950s, which included a posting to Naples. Muriel Spark introduced her to the translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller, whom Hazzard married in 1963. Her novels The Bay of Noon (1971) and The Transit of Venus (1981) were National Book Award finalists, while her last novel, The Great Fire, won the 2003 National Book Award, Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She was also the author of two collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction including the memoir Greene on Capri.
Shirley Hazzard is an author for whom there just aren't praises high enough. <b>Wise, elegant, generous, moving</b> - to finish reading a book of hers is to feel bereft of something sublime
- Sarah Waters,
The Australian-American writer's short fiction is full of precisely observed studies of thwarted connection . . . Often by portraying its absence, these stories assert the importance of true connection, in the elegant, scalpel-sharp prose for which Hazzard has been admired since her earliest work . . . <b>the collection offers a fine introduction to a remarkable writer who deserves to go on finding new readers</b>
Guardian (Book of the day)
Hazzard's stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: "We are human beings, not rational ones."
- Dwight Garner, New York Times
The distinctive and exacting fiction of Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) has not lacked advocates. Her output wasn't large - just four novels and two volumes of short stories, together with non-fiction including memoirs, essays and travel writing - but her two finest novels, <i>The Transit of Venus</i> (1980) and <i>The Great Fire</i> (2003), won major prizes and have not been forgotten... This definitive collection of Hazzard's short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent
- Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement
Shirley Hazzard is a perfectionist's writer.... [her stories are] slender yet solid, consummate, as fascinated and affected by the mysteries of experience as they are self-assured ... Her writing requires the sort of sustained attention she believed art deserved, but her relationship with her reader is always reciprocal: she doesn't create mystery but reveals its vital place in life
- Lauren Oyler, Harper's Review
Often by portraying its absence, these stories assert the importance of true connection, in the elegant, scalpel-sharp prose for which Hazzard has been admired since her earliest work... the collection offers a fine introduction to a remarkable writer who deserves to go on finding new readers.
- Stephanie Merritt, The Observer
Now, finally, her clear-headed brilliance seems to be on a steep upward popularity curve ... Reading the stories together is a treat ... Hazzard's is the sparky, considered voice of a world-class observer of humanity
- Isabel Berwick, Financial Times
Hazzard understood the human condition in all its contradiction, all its messiness, like few others. <i>Collected Stories</i> 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
Boston Globe
And what an exquisitely polished writer [Hazzard] was, at once serious and bitingly funny, a master of both the plush, well-rounded sentence and the oblique takedown. Not for Hazzard the stripped-down prose and catchy conversational style that were already coming into vogue when these stories were written
LA Times
Cosmopolitan in location, exquisitely executed, and glinting with the sort of keen wit and perception found in the fiction of Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Bowen, Hazzard's stories are startlingly fresh and revealing in their poise, sting, and compassion
- Mia Levitin, Irish Times
Collected Stories includes both volumes of 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.
Twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Taken together, Hazzard's short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, 'at once surgical and symphonic' (New Yorker), ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical sendups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut.
In an interview, 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.
'Shirley Hazzard is, purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in the English today' (Michael Cunningham).
Now at last comes the first complete book of her short stories, including those previously uncollected.
SHIRLEY HAZZARD's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satires 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 world of office jobs and dreary marriages. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendour of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her characters seek.
This marvellous volume includes the stories from Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses. Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard's biographer and editor of this collection has included two previously unpublished stories - `Le Nozze' and `The Sack of Silence' - found among Hazzard's papers. The remaining eight, formerly uncollected, stories were published in magazines, mainly the New Yorker, including her very first publshed story, 'Woollahra Road'.
On winning the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire in 2004 Shirley Hazzard wrote: 'Our world that seems charged with war is also the world in which the frail filament of expression miraculously persists and the phenomenon of the accurate word . . .'
Her stories themselves are miraculous expressions: understanding, probing, uncompromising and deeply felt.
Shirley Hazzard is an author for whom there just aren't praises high enough. <b>Wise, elegant, generous, moving</b> - to finish reading a book of hers is to feel bereft of something sublime
- Sarah Waters,
The Australian-American writer's short fiction is full of precisely observed studies of thwarted connection . . . Often by portraying its absence, these stories assert the importance of true connection, in the elegant, scalpel-sharp prose for which Hazzard has been admired since her earliest work . . . <b>the collection offers a fine introduction to a remarkable writer who deserves to go on finding new readers</b>
Guardian (Book of the day)
Hazzard's stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: "We are human beings, not rational ones."
- Dwight Garner, New York Times
The distinctive and exacting fiction of Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) has not lacked advocates. Her output wasn't large - just four novels and two volumes of short stories, together with non-fiction including memoirs, essays and travel writing - but her two finest novels, <i>The Transit of Venus</i> (1980) and <i>The Great Fire</i> (2003), won major prizes and have not been forgotten... This definitive collection of Hazzard's short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent
- Dinah Birch, Times Literary Supplement
Shirley Hazzard is a perfectionist's writer.... [her stories are] slender yet solid, consummate, as fascinated and affected by the mysteries of experience as they are self-assured ... Her writing requires the sort of sustained attention she believed art deserved, but her relationship with her reader is always reciprocal: she doesn't create mystery but reveals its vital place in life
- Lauren Oyler, Harper's Review
Often by portraying its absence, these stories assert the importance of true connection, in the elegant, scalpel-sharp prose for which Hazzard has been admired since her earliest work... the collection offers a fine introduction to a remarkable writer who deserves to go on finding new readers.
- Stephanie Merritt, The Observer
Now, finally, her clear-headed brilliance seems to be on a steep upward popularity curve ... Reading the stories together is a treat ... Hazzard's is the sparky, considered voice of a world-class observer of humanity
- Isabel Berwick, Financial Times
Hazzard understood the human condition in all its contradiction, all its messiness, like few others. <i>Collected Stories</i> 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
Boston Globe
And what an exquisitely polished writer [Hazzard] was, at once serious and bitingly funny, a master of both the plush, well-rounded sentence and the oblique takedown. Not for Hazzard the stripped-down prose and catchy conversational style that were already coming into vogue when these stories were written
LA Times
Cosmopolitan in location, exquisitely executed, and glinting with the sort of keen wit and perception found in the fiction of Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Bowen, Hazzard's stories are startlingly fresh and revealing in their poise, sting, and compassion
- Mia Levitin, Irish Times
Collected Stories includes both volumes of 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.
Twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Taken together, Hazzard's short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, 'at once surgical and symphonic' (New Yorker), ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical sendups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut.
In an interview, 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.
'Shirley Hazzard is, purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in the English today' (Michael Cunningham).
Now at last comes the first complete book of her short stories, including those previously uncollected.
SHIRLEY HAZZARD's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satires 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 world of office jobs and dreary marriages. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy, and the splendour of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her characters seek.
This marvellous volume includes the stories from Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses. Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard's biographer and editor of this collection has included two previously unpublished stories - `Le Nozze' and `The Sack of Silence' - found among Hazzard's papers. The remaining eight, formerly uncollected, stories were published in magazines, mainly the New Yorker, including her very first publshed story, 'Woollahra Road'.
On winning the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire in 2004 Shirley Hazzard wrote: 'Our world that seems charged with war is also the world in which the frail filament of expression miraculously persists and the phenomenon of the accurate word . . .'
Her stories themselves are miraculous expressions: understanding, probing, uncompromising and deeply felt.