Shirley Hazzard – författare

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short story collections - Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses - alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories.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 telescoping focus, ''at once surgical and symphonic'' (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.

Passionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in the summer countryside in Italy and its inevitable end. It takes place in a setting of pastoral beauty during a time of celebration -- a festival. Sophie, half English, half Italian, meets Tancredi, an Italian who is separated from his wife and family. In telling the story of their love affair, author Shirley Hazzard punctures the placid surface of polite Italian society to reveal the intense yearnings and surprising responses in sophisticated people caught up in emotions they do not always understand.

''A wonderfully mysterious book . . . unforgettably rich'' ANNE TYLER Caro, gallant and adventurous, is one of two Australian sisters who have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice, she is to find that love brings passion, sorrow, betrayal and finally hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other''s lives, love, death and two slow-burning secrets wait in ambush for them.From the Orange Prize shortlisted author of THE GREAT FIRE

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 waits her there. She has an introduction to a Neapolitan woman, and one day she idly follows it up. This is her leap through the looking glass.

The ''People in Glass Houses'' work for an American-based concern devoted to ''inflicting improvement'' the world over. Amongst them are sloppy but erudite Algie Wyatt, Swoboda, a Slav DP, who finally rebels against a daily inflow of documentation; modest Ashmole-Brown, whose surprise best-seller unseats Sadie Graine, the all-time corridor fixer; Jaspersen, who falls in and out of love with the Organization; and Clelia Kinslake, who meets the most critical non-crisis of her career in Crete. Shirley Hazzard''s eight dazzling stories are linked by a scorching contempt for the Organization.

Shirley Hazzard''s stories are sharp, sensitive portrayals of moments of crisis. Whether they are set in the Italian countryside or suburban Connecticut, the stories deal with real people and real problems. In the title piece, a young widow is surprised and ashamed by her lack of grief for her husband. In ''A Place in the Country,'' a woman has a passionate, guilty affair with her cousin''s husband. In ''Harold,'' a gawky, lonely young man finds acceptance and respect through his poetry. Moving and evocative, these ten stories are written with subtlety, humour and a keen understanding of the relationships between men and women.

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, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in Occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.

In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia''s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

When friends die, one''s own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him - not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well - on an island that was ''''not his kind of place,'''' but where he came season after season, year after year & where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story.''For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers & refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus & Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke & Lenin, plus hosts of artists, eccentrics & outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard & her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller; their friendship lasted until Greene''s death in 1991. In GREENE ON CAPRI, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene''s mercurial character, his work & talk & the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.

The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer''s sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict 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, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia''s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

In the words of Time magazine, "A near perfect novel...a small masterpiece" by the author of The Great FirePassionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in a summer countryside in Italy and its inevitable end. It takes place in a setting of pastoral beauty during a time of celebration--a festival.Sophie, half English, half Italian, meets Tancredi, an Italian who is separated from his wife and family. In telling the story of their love affair, Shirley Hazzard punctures the placid surface of polite Italian society to reveal the intense yearnings and surprising responses in sophisticated people caught up in emotions they do not always understand.