Collected Stories — Shirley Hazzard

“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[and] subtly hilarious” short fiction by the National Book Award winner, including previously uncollected and unpublished stories (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).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