The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard

'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. `Now, finally, her clear-headed brilliance seems to be on a steep upward popularity curve ... a treat ... the sparky, considered voice of a world-class observer of humanity' Isabel Berwick, Financial Times`This definitive collection is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent.' Dinah Birch, TLS`Feel timeless because she understands, as she writes ... "We are human beings, not rational ones." 'New York Times`Her writing requires the sort of sustained attention she believed art deserved, but her relationship with her reader is always reciprocal' - Lauren Oyler, Harper's Review` One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them. . . A remarkable writer ' --Stephanie Merritt, Observer`The sort of keen wit and perception found in Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Bowen ... startlingly fresh and revealing in their poise, sting, and compassion.' Mia Levitin, Irish Times`Devastation - in love and war - is the subject and the aim: and the reader is not spared... Few writers capture it so well: that which cannot be undone.' Helen Sullivan, Guardian 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short story collections - Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses - alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories.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.