New York Stories Of Elizabeth

Description

Elizabeth Hardwick was one of America's great postwar women of letters, celebrated as a novelist and an essayist. Until now, however, her slim but remarkable achievement as a writer of short stories has remained largely hidden, tucked away in the pages of the periodicals-such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books-in which her work 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, come to life in unexpected and lasting ways in Hardwick's beautiful and razor- harp stories.

Elizabeth Hardwick (b. 1916) has been a frequent contributor to The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, which she helped found in 1963. Her books include the novels The Simple Truth, The Ghostly Lover, and Sleepless Nights, the essay collection A View of My Own, and The Selected Letters of William James, for which she acted as editor. DARRYL PINCKNEY, a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, is the author of a novel, High Cotton, and Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature. He has worked for Robert Wilson on various theatrical projects, most recently an adaptation of Daniil Kharms's The Old Woman.

Lapidary and strange, these pieces are virtually free of narrative, depicting characters whose central failure is an inability to plot their own lives. Abstract nd impersonal, the prose fairly gleams in these pages. Guardian Weekly