“Shirley Hazzard is a perfectionist’s writer … Her writing requires the sort of sustained attention she believed art deserved, but her relationship with her reader is always reciprocal: she doesn’t create mystery but reveals its vital place in life. While she doesn’t purport to answer Why?, she understands that the magic of great fiction is in everyone, everywhere, asking.”

—LAUREN OYLER, Harper’s Magazine

“Hazzard, above all, makes us proud to be human in what can too often be a degraded world … On and off the page, Hazzard’s is the sparky, considered voice of a world-class observer of humanity.”

—ISABEL BERWICK, Financial Times

“Hazzard was born from the forehead of Zeus fully formed. She was in full possession of her craft from the very start … We find here Hazzard’s unique stylistic signature—one that combines subtle narrative intrigue with probing psychological insight in terse yet complex prose. We find also the relentless labour of description that qualifies her fiction as art, in Joseph Conrad’s lofty understanding of the term.”

—ROBERT POGUE HARRISON, Sydney Review of Books

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SHIRLEY HAZZARD

Collected Stories

SHIRLEY HAZZARD (1931–2016) was the author of several works of fiction, including The Evening of the Holiday, The Bay of Noon, The Transit of Venus (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), and The Great Fire (winner of the National Book Award), and of nonfiction, including Greene on Capri, a memoir about her friendship with Graham Greene. She lived in New York City, in Naples, and on Capri. You can sign up for email updates here.

A NOTE ABOUT THE EDITOR

BRIGITTA OLUBAS is a professor of English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is Shirley Hazzard’s authorized biographer and recently edited We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays. You can sign up for email updates here.

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