The Collected Stories Of Shirley Hazzard

The collected short fiction of a master prose stylist

Twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Here, Hazzard’s short-story collections, Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses, are presented in their entirety alongside uncollected stories, concluding with two previously unpublished stories found in typescript among her papers.

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. 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.