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    The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick

    Author Elizabeth Hardwick
    Introduction by Darryl Pinckney
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    Paperback
    $18.95 US
    New York Review Books | NYRB Classics
    On sale Jun 01, 2010 | 256 Pages | 9781590172872
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    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-sharp stories.

    “Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe.” – Susan Sontag

    “Hardwick herself is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer.” – Joyce Carol Oates
    Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature. View titles by Elizabeth Hardwick
    “Hardwick wrote when she had something to say, and she took her time; the impression of ease is owing strictly to her style. Not a poet, she produced a poet’s prose…” –The Guardian (London)

    “An odd, original talent, Elizabeth Hardwick writes with a tremendous subtlety and a fine drawn sensibility of common frailties.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe.” —Susan Sontag

    “Hardwick is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer.” —Joyce Carol Oates

    "Elizabeth Hardwick died in 2007, but her influence can still be felt in any writer who knows that a story or essay’s tone is based as much on a word’s weight, and the rhythm of a paragraph, as it is on thesis and intention....In the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, Hardwick has a brilliant champion. He has gathered together the best of Hardwick’s short fiction in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, and, in his powerful and insightful introduction, he expresses something of the charm of the woman—and her great struggles to produce stories that reflected her unique process of intellection, her engagement in the world of ideas. " — Hilton Als, The New Yorker

    About

    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-sharp stories.

    “Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe.” – Susan Sontag

    “Hardwick herself is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer.” – Joyce Carol Oates

    Author

    Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was born in Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at the University of Kentucky and Columbia University. A recipient of a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is the author of three novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays. She was a co-founder and advisory editor of The New York Review of Books and contributed more than one hundred reviews, articles, reflections, and letters to the magazine. NYRB Classics publishes Sleepless Nights, a novel, and Seduction and Betrayal, a study of women in literature. View titles by Elizabeth Hardwick

    Praise

    “Hardwick wrote when she had something to say, and she took her time; the impression of ease is owing strictly to her style. Not a poet, she produced a poet’s prose…” –The Guardian (London)

    “An odd, original talent, Elizabeth Hardwick writes with a tremendous subtlety and a fine drawn sensibility of common frailties.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe.” —Susan Sontag

    “Hardwick is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer.” —Joyce Carol Oates

    "Elizabeth Hardwick died in 2007, but her influence can still be felt in any writer who knows that a story or essay’s tone is based as much on a word’s weight, and the rhythm of a paragraph, as it is on thesis and intention....In the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, Hardwick has a brilliant champion. He has gathered together the best of Hardwick’s short fiction in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, and, in his powerful and insightful introduction, he expresses something of the charm of the woman—and her great struggles to produce stories that reflected her unique process of intellection, her engagement in the world of ideas. " — Hilton Als, The New Yorker

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