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two previously unpublished stories
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. After all, as she writes in The Picnic, It was tempting to
confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with
love. And yet 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.
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.
