Synopses & Reviews
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short-story collections — Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses — alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories
Including 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” (The New Yorker), ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satirical sendups of international bureaucracy, from the Italian countryside to suburban Connecticut.
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.
Review
"[Hazzard] writes like a sculptor, in that what she carefully carves away reveals the most exquisite shapes." Motoko Rich, The New York Times
Review
“Hazzard’s prose is magic on the page, somehow at once surgical and symphonic... [Her sentences] are small masterpieces that amount to a large one.” Tad Friend, The New Yorker
About the Author
Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) is the author of several works of nonfiction, including Greene on Capri, a memoir of Graham Greene, and of fiction, including The Evening of the Holiday, The Bay of Noon, The Transit of Venus, and The Great Fire, winner of the National Book Award. She lived in New York City and Capri.