Collected Stories

Written by Shirley Hazzard and Zoë Heller

Narrated by Susan Lyons

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. 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 protaganists 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781705009796

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia and travelled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of sixteen, she was engaged by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China. At twenty, she moved to New York, working for the United Nations throughout much of the 1950s, which included a posting to Naples. Muriel Spark introduced her to the translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller, whom Hazzard married in 1963. Her novels The Bay of Noon (1971) and The Transit of Venus (1981) were National Book Award finalists, while her last novel, The Great Fire, won the 2003 National Book Award, Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She was also the author of two collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction including the memoir Greene on Capri.

Reviews for Collected Stories

[viviennestrauss · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My favorite stories were the ones about The Organization (The United Nations). Some stories seemed so vague... I did enjoy it overall if not a bit on the dry side.