The Great Fire

The Great Fire PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706352
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143135651
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

The Bay of Noon

The Bay of Noon PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 1466800488
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Long out of print, Shirley Hazzard's classic novel of love and memory A young Englishwoman working in Naples, Jenny comes to Italy fleeing a history that threatened to undo her. Alone in the fabulously ruined city, she idly follows up a letter of introduction from an acquaintance and thus changes her life forever. Through the letter, she meets Giocanda, a beautiful and gifted writer, and Gianni, a famous Roman film director and Giocanda's lover. At work she encounters Justin, a Scotsman whose inscrutability Jenny finds mysteriously attractive. As she becomes increasingly involved in the lives of these three, she discovers that the past--and the patterns of a lifetime--are not easily discarded.

Greene on Capri

Greene on Capri PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429979259
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The subtle portrait of a great but difficult man and a legendary island. When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him-not wisely, perhaps, but fairly well-on an island that was "not his kind of place," but where he came season after season, year after year; and where he, too, will be subsumed into the capacious story. For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, and Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. Here in the 1960s Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller; their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991. In Greene on Capri, Hazzard uses their ever volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene's mercurial character, his work and talk, and the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived on this ravishing, enchanted island.

The Evening of the Holiday

The Evening of the Holiday PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312423261
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Passionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in a summer countryside in Italy and its inevitable end.

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
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.

Collected Stories

Collected Stories PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374720487
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
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 stories 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 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.

People in Glass Houses

People in Glass Houses PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466801069
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Only those who keep their wit and affections about them will survive the mass conditioning of the Organization, where confusion solemnly rules and conformity is king. As in our world itself, humanity prevails in the courage, love, and laughter of singular spirits--of men and women for whom life is an adventure no Organization can quell, and whose souls remain their own.

The Ancient Shore

The Ancient Shore PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226322017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 140

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Book Description
"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. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. Battered by World War II, Naples would remain for decades one of the most violent and impoverished places in Italy, but in its passion, vivacity, and beauty, the city still justified the loving words written about it by Goethe, Byron, and other literary travelers over the centuries." "The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzard's writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard's concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time - often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history."--BOOK JACKET.

Countenance of Truth

Countenance of Truth PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description