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Collected Stories includes both volumes of the 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short-story collections-Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses-alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished storiesShirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment.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. After all, as she writes in "The Picnic," "It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn't cope with love." And yet 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. 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.

SHIRLEY HAZZARD's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and accomplishment. Taken together, these twenty-eight short stories are masterworks ranging from quotidian struggles between beauty and pragmatism to satires 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 world of office jobs and dreary marriages. And yet it is the comedy, the tragedy and the splendour of love, the pursuit and the absence of it, that animates Hazzard's stories and provides the truth and beauty that her characters seek.This marvellous volume includes the stories from Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses. Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard's biographer and editor of this collection has included two previously unpublished stories - `Le Nozze' and `The Sack of Silence' - found among Hazzard's papers. The remaining eight, formerly uncollected, stories were published in magazines, mainly the New Yorker, including her very first published story, 'Woollahra Road'.On winning the Miles Franklin Award for The Great Fire in 2004 Shirley Hazzard wrote: 'Our world that seems charged with war is also the world in which the frail filament of expression miraculously persists and the phenomenon of the accurate word . . .' Her stories themselves are miraculous expressions: understanding, probing, uncompromising and deeply felt.

'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.

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.

From the prizewinning author of The Great Fire comes 'an authentic work of art . . . A cause for delight and gratitude . . . Beautiful, absorbing, satisfying' Chicago Tribune

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. This work collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples. Illustrated with photographs, it is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love.

From the author of the award-winning The Great Fire, an extraordinary collection of stories about life in the Organisation - a polyglot crucible in which talent rots and mediocrity thrives and the 'rights of man' are unthinkingly sacrificed on the altar of inter-departmental strife.

From our much loved writer Shirley Hazzard, comes a ravishing novel set in Naples - full of observation, feeling, love and life.

The sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict by 'one of the greatest writers working in English today' (Michael Cunningham) and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Reissue of this highly acclaimed Virago title, a 'finely written, beautiful and tragic novel' - Hermione Lee, FT

* The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man on the legendary island of Capri by the renowned author of THE TRANSIT OF VENUS