“Sharply intelligent [and] subtly hilarious” short fiction by the National Book Award winner, including previously uncollected and unpublished stories (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
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. 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.
“A wonderful read for anyone who loves fiction that delights and enlightens, challenges and rewards.” —The Boston Globe
“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.” —Los Angeles Times
“This definitive collection of Hazzard’s short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent.” —Times Literary Supplement
Includes a foreword by Zoe Heller
