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.
