Collected Stories

Written by Shirley Hazzard and Zoe 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 in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. Ms. Hazzard's novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1981) and The Great Fire (2003). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lived in New York, with sojourns in Italy.

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.