Shirley Hazzard is a perfectionist’s writer. Her books, composed of dense, layered sentences, are like the sort of difficult, delicate cakes no one bothers to make anymore. They’re slender yet solid, consummate, as fascinated and affected by the mysteries of experience as they are self-assured ... Where contemporary aphorists call on the reader to fill in the gaps of their fragmented narratives, often visually represented as white space, Hazzard manages to traverse incredible spans of time and emotion from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph while fastidiously ensuring everything the reader needs to understand is there ... Her writing requires the sort of sustained attention she believed art deserved, but her relationship with her reader is always reciprocal: she doesn’t create mystery but reveals its vital place in life ... Her narratives are structured as inevitabilities in a way that heightens the role and significance of the writer without overstating it; events are heavily foreshadowed, and history, particularly the World Wars, is always refracting the present and future. At the same time, one of her strengths is the way she makes the random occurrences that appear throughout her work—sudden deaths, strange illnesses, the heartbreak of unplanned romance on the eve of a planned departure—truly stunning, the way they would be in life ... Like love, great art always seems to contain some portion of inexplicability, but the argument Hazzard developed throughout her career was, in fact, empoweringly rational: it’s only in the telling that chance becomes fate. In the telling, it is obvious,' the narrator of The Bay of Noon says. 'In the telling, all things are.'

Hazzard’s stories are shrewd, formal and epigrammatic. One feels smarter and more pulled together after reading them. You drop into one as if you were a wet cell phone and it were a jar of uncooked rice ... a single important and elegant volume ... These are about condescending, pitilessly detached men and the trapped women who love them — and they’re simply brutal ... Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: 'We are human beings, not rational ones.'

Hazzard’s commitment to what she called 'the testimony of the accurate word' made her acutely sensitive to the inaccurate. We see this in her stories ... In the stories...her sentences are scrupulous and exact, full of diamond-hard images and casually magnificent figures of speech ... Best of all perhaps are Hazzard’s swift pen portraits of boorish minor characters ... In Hazzard’s world, heroism and excellence belong as much to the present as the past.

Admirers of Hazzard’s novels will find much to love here, but it also proves to be a fine introduction to the late author’s work ... The stories in the final section of the collection are all quite beautiful, with 'Comfort' perhaps the most accomplished. It’s a gorgeous snapshot of a story, taking place over a brief conversation between a woman in an unhappy relationship and her friend, a man who’s in love with her ... It’s a stunning story, like so many of the others in the collection. Hazzard understood the human condition in all its contradiction, all its messiness, like few others. Collected Stories is certainly essential for admirers of the author, but it’s also a wonderful read for anyone who loves fiction that delights and enlightens, challenges and rewards.

Often by portraying its absence, these stories assert the importance of true connection, in the elegant, scalpel-sharp prose for which Hazzard has been admired since her earliest work. Devoted fans may feel a little cheated – only two of the stories here are truly 'new', discovered in typescript among her papers after her death – but the collection offers a fine introduction to a remarkable writer who deserves to go on finding new readers.

Hazzard’s sentences are clever, dense; they make assumptions about the reader’s knowledge of Italian or classical myth. Her characters speak in full sentences. Sometimes the formality seems positively prewar, yet she was published from the 1960s onwards ... What makes her different from other writers who like to show off their cleverness is that Hazzard is actually focused on the frailty and dignity of the human condition ... Now, finally, her clear-headed brilliance seems to be on a steep upward popularity curve ... Hazzard presents a world in one building; a global gathering that exists, it seems, to swap brown paper files and have awkward meetings. Reading the stories together is a treat — through these recurring characters and their glimpsed lives the reader is immersed in a fully realised human ecosystem ... On and off the page, Hazzard’s is the sparky, considered voice of a world-class observer of humanity.

What does it mean to say a literary work is 'dated'? Must fiction be timely or à la mode to resonate? In a harsh pre-publication review, Publisher’s Weekly branded the late Shirley Hazzard’s Collected Stories 'quaint antiques from a bygone time.' But Hazzard’s stories were out of step with her times even when they were first published in the 1960s, primarily in the New Yorker. To read them now will indeed transport you to a bygone time— when travelers hungry for culture and history hopped on airplanes to Italy without viral anxiety and enjoyed civilized communal dinners in pensiones rather than takeout in Airbnbs ... And what an exquisitely polished writer [Hazzard] was, at once serious and bitingly funny, a master of both the plush, well-rounded sentence and the oblique takedown. Not for Hazzard the stripped-down prose and catchy conversational style that were already coming into vogue when these stories were written ... To dismiss these revelatory, human stories as fusty relics would be merciless — and unaccountable.

With one ludicrous event and wry observation after another, the stories are all the more enjoyable for their very datedness. ... Yet she was not known mainly as a humorist, and the other stories are generally about troubled relationships — as one of her characters observes, 'Marriage is like democracy — it doesn’t really work but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with.' Often the characters’ frustrations and losses are balanced by the wonderful details of their locations — Italy, Greece, the Swiss Alps, Hong Kong, the Connecticut shore ... The woman is a genius of creating character with just a few physical details.

'Harold,' the first short story written by Australian American Hazzard, was enthusiastically accepted by the New Yorker in 1959. It is a gem still, as are the other 27 faceted and beaming stories ... Cosmopolitan in location, exquisitely executed, and glinting with the sort of keen wit and perception found in the fiction of Margaret Drabble and Elizabeth Bowen, Hazzard’s stories are startlingly fresh and revealing in their poise, sting, and compassion.

In Hazzard’s precise fiction, devastation—in love and war—is the subject and the aim: and the reader is not spared ... To enter this world—'Hazzard-land,' as the writer Alice Jolly calls it—is to surrender to being in the company of characters who know the classics, quote poetry and move through elegant surroundings wearing nice clothes. Her writing feels more old-fashioned than the 1950s and 60s in which her stories are set—which might be why, like a frog left to simmer in a delicate consommé, we don’t see our own total annihilation coming.

While the two posthumously-published pieces are, unsurprisingly, not fully developed, the voice is unmistakably Hazzard’s, containing her characteristically clever repartee ... Hazzard’s prose is marked by its precision; she took her vocation seriously, redrafting each page up to 30 times ... It’s not only an elevated register and omniscient asides that lend Hazzard’s oeuvre an air of formality but the bygone era of intellectualism she evokes, with cosmopolitan characters slipping into Italian or French and quoting poetry ... With an ear attuned to dialogue – both internal and external – Hazzard believed that speech 'can crucially suggest what is not said'. Nestled in her characters’ exchanges are gut-punching aphorisms ... Carefully crafted and astutely observed.

A friend said to me the other day that it is interesting that short stories date in a way that novels do not; of course, that can’t be said of all stories. I am thinking of Chekhov. But that may be because the small world of the story is so tightly constructed, and focused on a few telling details. There’s a dated quality to the hopeless internecine personnel battles in what Hazzard calls 'the Organization,' while her exquisitely constructed stories of heartbreak are sturdier vessels ... a dark pleasure of these mordant pages is Hazzard’s gift for aphorism.

Hazzard, who died in 2016, is best known as the author of two magnificent, intricate novels, >em>The Transit of Venus ...and The Great Fire...The stories collected here offer a perfect introduction to her astringent sensibility ... Hazzard’s characters are yearning for intimacy and perfect understanding and are not quite resigned to their inevitable disappointment ... The stories set at the U.N. are tartly satirical as Hazzard buries her bureaucrats, no matter how idealistic, under a blizzard of papers such as the 'Provisional Report of the Working Group on Unforeseeable Contingencies' and checklists 'painstakingly devised to avoid anything resembling a personal opinion.' They feel like an up-to-the-minute investigation of the failures of White saviorism in the form of a time capsule from the Mad Men era ... Sharply intelligent, nuanced, precise, and subtly hilarious.

...makes for an outmoded collection, propelled by themes of mid-century bourgeois disillusionment—affairs, arguments, disappointing relationships, time spent at country houses, and trips to Europe. Despite the heavy emotional atmosphere, Hazzard’s prose has the restraint and polish of glossy magazine writing, offering crisp, easy descriptions of her desperate characters. Unfortunately, the stories never quite achieve the depth they seemingly aim for, especially in those about the staff of an international peacekeeping organization from People in Glass Houses ... These stories feel like quaint antiques from a bygone time.