The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
  • Published: 1 June 2010
  • ISBN: 9781590172872
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00

The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick

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Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America’s great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and as an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, with her work tucked away in the pages of the periodicals—such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books—in which it originally appeared. This first collection of Hardwick’s short fiction reveals her brilliance as a stylist and as an observer of contemporary life. A young woman returns from New York to her childhood Kentucky home and discovers the world of difference within her. A girl’s boyfriend is not quite good enough, his “silvery eyes, light and cool, revealing nothing except pure possibility, like a coin in hand.” A magazine editor’s life falls strangely to pieces after she loses both her husband and her job. Individual lives and the life of New York, the setting or backdrop for most of these stories, are strikingly and memorably depicted in Hardwick’s beautiful and razor-sharp prose.
  • Published: 1 June 2010
  • ISBN: 9781590172872
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $35.00
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Also by Elizabeth Hardwick

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Sleepless Nights
Seduction and Betrayal
See all

Praise for The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick

  • Praise for Sleepless Nights
  • "Brilliantly poised and confidently daring, Sleepless Nights is a chin-up tightrope walk along the borderline between fiction and autobiography... it is graceful, laconic, and wise." -- Newsweek
  • "This original novel does everything for lost times that an irreplaceable family photograph album does--except that here, the words are worth a thousand pictures." -- Philip Roth
  • "An extraordinary and haunting book." -- Joan Didion, NYT Book Review
  • "Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe. Sleepless Nights is elegant, wise, tasty--a truly wonderful book." -- Susan Sontag
  • Praise for Seduction and Betrayal
  • "A rich, moving historical pageant. Literature's women-- the creators and the created-- pass before us on stage sets of art, romance, sex, and death." --Newsweek
  • "Like Beauvior, Hardwick directly addresses herself to female vulnerability, to women's relations to men, to their own work, their options... What makes this book special is the high order of Hardwick's sensibility - essentially literary - and her subtle style. Her superb writing is a rare gift to the reader....It is the complexity of the literary sensibility that dazzles the reader and makes her book a rare pleasure." -- NYT Book Review
  • "Miss Hardwick writes about the potential governess', the wasted middle--class ladies, fenced in with their own thoughts of escape and of risk, who were at once a public for fiction and a source of it, being denied a share in history, unless it were through fortunate marriage or intrigue" -- The New York Review of Books
  • "Hardwick herself is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer." -- Joyce Carol Oate

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