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.
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Shirley Hazzard—Author, Amateur, Intellectual, by Brigitta Olubas
- Part I. Through Literature Itself
- We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think
- The Lonely Word
- Part II. The Expressive Word
- A Mind Like a Blade: Review of Muriel Spark, Collected Stories I and The Public Image
- Review of Jean Rhys, Quartet
- The Lasting Sickness of Naples: Review of Matilde Serao, Il Ventre di Napoli
- The New Novel by the New Nobel Prize Winner: Review of Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm
- Ordinary People: Review of Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn and Excellent Women
- Translating Proust
- Introduction to Geoffrey Scott’s The Portrait of Zélide
- Introduction to Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude
- William Maxwell
- Part III. Public Themes
- The Patron Saint of the UN is Pontius Pilate
- “Gulag” and the Men of Peace
- The United Nations: Where Governments Go to Church
- The League of Frightened Men: Why the UN is So Useless
- UNhelpful: Waldheim’s Latest Debacle
- A Writer’s Reflections on the Nuclear Age
- Part IV. The Great Occasion
- Canton More Far
- Papyrology at Naples
- The Tuscan in Each of Us
- Part V. Last Words
- 2003 National Book Award Acceptance
- The New York Society Library Discussion, September 2012
- Notes
- Index
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