Shirley Hazzard

The scene is Naples, against whose ancient and fantastic background the modern action takes place. Among the protagonists is Jenny, young and pretty, who has come to Naples in flight from a sombre drama, unaware that a larger drama awaits her there. She has an introduction to a Neapolitan woman, and one day she idly follows it up. This is...

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short story collections - Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses - alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories.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...

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis...

For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Brought together by the death of a mutual friend in the late 1970s, they discovered a profound connection built on mutual affinities for literature and culture and common values of humanism and cosmopolitanism. Expatriates of No...

Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work. Hazzard writes about...

The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past,...

For millennia, the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. It was here in the 1960s that Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, and their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991....

The Transit of Venus tells the story of Caro, gallant and adventurous, who is one of two Australian sisters that have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist Ted Tice, Caro finds that love brings passion, sorrow, betrayal, and finally hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. Yet,...

'One of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century' PARIS REVIEW'The Transit of Venus is astronomical: as sharp, remote and dazzling as a celestial body' LAUREN GROFF'A wonderfully mysterious book . . . unforgettably rich' ANNE TYLER'Epic and microscopic . . . stitched in prose of gorgeously sustained intensity' GEOFF DYERThe tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The...

The 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. With 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...