Collected Stories

By: Shirley Hazzard, Zoe Heller (Foreword By)

Narrated by: Susan Lyons

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short-story collections - Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses - alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories.

Including 28 works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. 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 send-ups 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.

©2020 Shirley Hazzard (P)2020 Recorded Books

A Collection of Elegant, Sophisticated Short Stories - Extremely Well Read

This is an excellent audiobook. The narrator, Susan Lyons, is very professional. I purchased this along with Kindle and I was glad that I did so. I needed to often visually read and often re read parts of stories. There were many cultural and literary references that I needed to study. There is very elegant depictions of scenery that would have been lost on me if I had only listened.

The stories are about everyday life, failed relationships, frustrating bureaucrats, etc... in other words,these are not "action" stories. I am a male and I loved them. However I feel these may appeal slightly more to some female readers.

Also I found them unusually sophisticated. In one story thee was a joke about a line from Macbeth in Shakespeare, that was not lost on any character in the story, but I did not have a clue until I looked it up. And I have read and studied MacBeth. That is just one of many examples that I could describe. In that context it reminded me of some other very sophisticated authors that I have read. I loved this audiobook, just know what you are getting into. Thank You...