Cirrus@Austlit

'Two extraordinary writers, one difficult mother and a vanished literary world.

'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 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.'  (Publication summary)

'The collected short fiction of a master prose stylist

'Twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Here, Hazzard's short-story collections, Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses, are presented in their entirety alongside uncollected stories, concluding with two previously unpublished stories found in typescript among her papers.

'Taken together, Hazzard's short stories are masterworks in telescoping focus, "at once surgical and symphonic" (The 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.' (Publication summary)

'These nonfiction works span from the 1960s to the 2000s and were produced by one of the great fiction writers of the period. They add critical depth to Shirley Hazzard's creative world and encapsulate her extensive and informed thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They also offer greater access to her brilliant craftsmanship and the multiple registers in which her writings operate. Hazzard writes about the manifold failings of the United Nations, where she worked in the early 1950s. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She presents her thoughts on the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature. These works contribute to a keener understanding of postwar letters, thought, and politics, supported by an introduction that situates Hazzard's writing within its historical context and emphasizes her influence on world literature. This collection confirms Hazzard's place within a network of writers, artists, and intellectuals who believe in the ongoing power of literature to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite - or maybe because of - the world's disheartening realities.' (Publication summary)

'"Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity but for interest: to make the adventure of existence more vivid, more poignant." Such a life is what Shirley Hazzard found when she first landed on the shore of Naples as a young woman in the early 1950s: underneath the devastation caused by World War II, the city that had bewitched such literary visitors as Byron and Goethe remained intact, ready to charm the patient and attentive traveler.

'That sojourn was the first step in a lifelong love affair with Naples. Along with her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard made Naples a second home for decades, and The Ancient Shore collects the best of her writings on the city, its people, and its literary heritage. While acknowledging that Naples can be off-putting to the casual tourist, Hazzard takes readers behind the city's rebarbative face, showing the underlying beauty and unrivaled hospitality that await those who take the time to truly understand its rhythms and its history. A much-loved New Yorker essay by Steegmuller telling the harrowing story of his mugging - and the attentive care he received in its aftermath - rounds out a collection that memorably limns the inherent contradictions of contemporary Naples: prickly but passionate, violent but giving, and always breathtakingly unforgettable.

'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.' (Publisher's blurb)

'The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.

'Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith's sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.