Best Selling Books by Shirley Hazzard

“Sharply intelligent [and] subtly hilarious” short fiction by the National Book Award winner, including previously uncollected and unpublished stories (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). 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. 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. “A wonderful read for anyone who loves fiction that delights and enlightens, challenges and rewards.” —The Boston Globe “What an exquisitely polished writer she was, at once serious and bitingly funny, a master of both the plush, well-rounded sentence and the oblique takedown.” —Los Angeles Times “This definitive collection of Hazzard’s short stories is a welcome reminder of her remarkable talent.” —Times Literary Supplement Includes a foreword by Zoe Heller

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.

"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics'' Circle Award The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard''s most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard''s novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.

From the author of The Great Fire, a collection of stories about love and acceptance, expectations and disappointment 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 young 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, humor, and a keen understanding of the relationships between men and women.

Only those who keep their wit and affections about them will survive the mass conditioning of the Organization, where confusion solemnly rules and conformity is king. As in our world itself, humanity prevails in the courage, love, and laughter of singular spirits--of men and women for whom life is an adventure no Organization can quell, and whose souls remain their own.

Long out of print, Shirley Hazzard''s classic novel of love and memory A young Englishwoman working in Naples, Jenny comes to Italy fleeing a history that threatened to undo her. Alone in the fabulously ruined city, she idly follows up a letter of introduction from an acquaintance and thus changes her life forever. Through the letter, she meets Giocanda, a beautiful and gifted writer, and Gianni, a famous Roman film director and Giocanda''s lover. At work she encounters Justin, a Scotsman whose inscrutability Jenny finds mysteriously attractive. As she becomes increasingly involved in the lives of these three, she discovers that the past--and the patterns of a lifetime--are not easily discarded.

The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. 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; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story. For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, and Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and 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 and talk, and the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.

In the words of Time magazine, " A near perfect novel...a small masterpiece" by the author of The Great Fire Passionate 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.

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 her employment at the United Nations and the institution''s manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite—or maybe because of—the world''s disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard''s place as one of the twentieth century''s sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.

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 Country presents Hazzard and Keene’s correspondence, offering readers a new and intimate perspective on the work and achievements of these towering figures. Both left behind their countries of birth, and they shared experiences of displacement, estrangement, and fashioning new lives and selves in adopted homelands. Hazzard, who departed from Australia as a teenager without completing her formal education, led an expatriate life in New York and Italy as she attained literary fame. Keene, a pacifist who served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, devoted himself to the literature and culture of Japan, where he became revered. Their erudite and elegantly written letters trace the larger story of their friendship, finding striking overlaps between their distinctive worlds. Recording a vanished way of literary and intellectual life, Expatriates of No Country casts a new light on two extraordinary people through their unlikely connection.

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 Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted. “Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum “Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times “The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—Booklist, starred review

''Shirley Hazzard is, purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in the English today'' Michael Cunningham. Now at last comes the first complete book of her short stories, including those previously uncollected. 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.

Considerada «una de las grandes novelas en inglés del siglo XX» por The Paris Review y relanzada recientemente como un clásico moderno, El tránsito de Venus (1980) narra la historia de dos hermanas huérfanas australianas, Caroline y Grace Bell, que, todavía jóvenes, se mudan a Inglaterra después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en busca de una nueva vida. La trama viaja de Sydney a Londres, Nueva York y Estocolmo, de la década de 1950 a la de 1980: a lo largo de los años las dos hermanas conocen la seducción y el abandono, el matrimonio y la viudedad, el amor y la traición. Con una prosa exquisita, la novela narra los cambios y el absurdo de la vida moderna a través de una saga familiar arrolladora y una historia de amor desesperada. «Esta obra intrincada y magníficamente escrita se ha convertido merecidamente en un clásico. Trata de los grandes temas: el amor (por supuesto) y sus traiciones, la fidelidad, los descubrimientos científicos (en este caso la astronomía) sobre lo que se podría llamar la vida orgánica. A pesar de la brillantez del estilo y de la vívida humanidad de los personajes, sobre la historia pende un poderoso sentido del mal, de tal modo que, cuando el lector se va acercando al final, empieza a temer que le aguarda la tragedia.» John Banville, The New York Times

»Ein fast perfekter Roman. Shirley Hazzard schreibt so gut wie Stendhal.« The New York Times Die ungleichen Waisen Caro und Grace Bell verlassen Australien, um im England nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ein neues Leben beginnen. Sie treffen dort auf die Männer, mit denen sich ihre Leben in den folgenden drei Jahrzehnten durch alle politischen Verwerfungen und über die Kontinente hinweg verweben. Astronom Ted Tice umwirbt die selbstbewusste Caro, die einem manipulativen Theaterschriftsteller verfällt. Ihre sanfte Schwester Grace hofft auf Erfüllung in einer scheinbar glücklichen Ehe mit einem Karrierediplomaten. In präzisen und zugleich lyrischen Sätzen entwirft Shirley Hazzard eine Welt, die von unaufhaltsamen Gesetzen bestimmt ist wie die majestätischen Umlaufbahnen der Planeten - und deren Figuren in ihrer Klarheit und Unbeugsamkeit an die klassische Tragödie erinnern. »Ein plötzlicher Lichtstreif spaltete Erde und Himmel« - und genau diese magische Beleuchtung ist so besonders bei der großen Menschenschilderung von Shirley Hazzard. Transit der Venus ist ihr schönstes, reifstes und aufregendstes Werk! Michael Krüger

Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower met in person for the first time in London in 1972, six years after they began a correspondence that would span four decades. They exchanged letters, cards and telegrams, and made occasional phone calls between Harrower''s home in Sydney and Hazzard''s apartments in New York, Naples and Capri. The two women wrote to each other of their daily lives, of impediments to writing, their reading, politics and world affairs, and in Hazzard''s case, her travels. And they wrote about Hazzard''s mother, for whose care Harrower took increasing - and increasingly reluctant - responsibility from the early 1970s (precisely the period when she herself virtually stopped writing). Edited by Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard''s official biographer, and Susan Wyndham, who interviewed both Hazzard and Harrower, this is an extraordinary account of two literary luminaries, their complex relationship and their times.

This book details Shirley Hazzard''s reply to a series of questions to authors posed in Australian Literary studies relating to their short story and fiction writing.

No pós-segunda guerra, duas irmãs, Caroline e Grace Bell, deixam para trás a Austrália natal em busca de uma vida nova na Grã-Bretanha. Inevitável como o trânsito do planeta Vênus diante do Sol é o destino que lhes aguarda - amores impossíveis, dor e redenção.

Deux sœurs orphelines, Caroline et Grace, quittent l''Australie pour l''Angleterre. Leurs destins, en apparence différents, laissent pourtant un égal goût de cendres : Grace connaît le bonheur tranquille de la femme au foyer ; Caro, " enfant de Vénus ", préfère l''amour hors mariage et le chaotique monde du travail. Entre 1940 et 1970, de Sydney à Londres, New York et Stockholm, c''est le passage du Nouveau Monde à l''Ancien Continent, une traversée initiatique, qui mènera ces personnages de l''innocence à l''expérience. Sur les traces de Henry James et d''Edith Wharton, Shirley Hazzard cisèle l''intime des vies tout en les mêlant aux échos de l''Histoire. Art de la suggestion et du non-dit, finesse psychologique, perfection du style : Le passage de Vénus l''imposa d''emblée comme un écrivain majeur de notre époque.

The collection comprises fifty-seven handwritten and typed letters, the majority of which were written by Australian-American novelist, short story writer, and essayist Shirley Hazzard to her close friend British novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist Muriel Spark, with additional letters written by Hazzard''s husband, American biographer, translator and fiction writer, Francis Steegmuller to Spark and four from Spark to Hazzard. The correspondence reveals Hazzard''s feelings and thoughts about her writing, travels, husband and social networks, and provide an insight into the life of a significant Australian expatriate writer living and working in the international literary arena; the close relationship between Hazzard and Spark and the influence they had on each other and their writing; insights into women writers living and working in an international literary scene; the inside workings of The New Yorker Magazine; and American politics and society, with references to the Watergate scandal.

Letter concerns Shirley Hazzard''s book, The Transit of Venus. Accompanied by letter from John Beston to Marianne Ehrhardt, 23 Dec [1980] (1 leaf handwritten).