The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York Review Books Classics)
Elizabeth Hardwick
Language: English
Pages: 224
ISBN: 1590172876
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
of the junk shop came to him late at night, when he was at home, he would call Linda and take her to his room. “I don’t think you’re in love with that hillbilly you’ve been going around with,” she said to him brazenly one night. “You sure don’t act like a man in love.” No, he certainly didn’t love Marianne, he would tell himself, with a sore heart. In fact he hated her. Her desolating memories provoked his anger. He, with his bad teeth, his debts, his round, tired face, his dingy cot, his
believe it is expressed.” “How strange! I cannot imagine it at all. You don’t seem the type. You seem made for happiness, I must say, but perhaps that is superficial.” “Happiness superficial?” “No, my thinking you are made for it.” And then Adele noticed that Matt’s plump little hands were trembling, as if she had made some spectacular declaration of love for him. “Poor Matt,” she said suddenly, moved by the thought of his complacence and his humbleness purchased with suffering. Matt was
items seemed to her amusing, mere props for a film about a career woman in a great Manhattan firm. She laughed gaily at the people in the office, but always with graciousness and a note of patience and forgiveness. It was pleasant to be seeing things for the first time — to feel the frightening clarity. One morning, a hurried conference was called. In Mrs. Morton’s eyes there was a nervous eagerness and satisfaction, and Clara suddenly found herself saying with a bright, abrupt laugh, “I feel
until six in the afternoon. New classics were magically restored after the cruelty of time had spent itself. The tides flowed and Roger swam. It is Christmas at The Pleiade. Roger’s days soar as he dispenses, in the spirit of charity baskets, the gifts of the world. Storytellers from Africa, epics from Latin America, painful gutting rituals from Japan, women poets from the Russia of the twenties — the 1920s, the period of his first passions, now a hallowed battlefield filled with noble
only words, the druggist says. Worms? No, words. Spring Issue, 1958: “There remains the case of the forcibly Sovietized countries of Eastern Europe, whose plight we cannot recognize as definite.” That was good news for us of the anti-Stalinist left. At midafternoon the sun, slipping through the mist, made a bright stripe across the face of the handsome man. His skin had the sallow tintings of so many interesting peoples. But there was nothing of shah or sheikh or pasha in his black-suited