COLLECTED STORIES

Hazzard, who died in 2016, is best known as the author of two magnificent, intricate novels, The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003). The stories collected here offer a perfect introduction to her astringent sensibility.

Born in Australia to a Welsh father and Scottish mother, she grew up in Sydney as well as Hong Kong, Italy, New Zealand, and New York, where she worked for the United Nations for 10 years. There are two entire books included here—Cliffs of Fall (1963), which features men and women searching for love but more often finding incomprehension, and People in Glass Houses (1967), a collection of linked stories set at the Organization, a not-even-thinly-disguised U.N.—as well as a number of unpublished or uncollected stories. Hazzard’s characters are yearning for intimacy and perfect understanding and are not quite resigned to their inevitable disappointment: “Marriage is like democracy—it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with.” Whether they’re in Tuscany, the Greek Islands, or the suburbs of New York, they search for truth and are devoted to beauty; Hazzard’s writing is formal, and even the dialogue is elegantly mannered: “Why, even religion—even the law, than which, after all, nothing could be more unjust—takes account of extenuating circumstances,” one man improbably muses after a dull dinner party. 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.