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Available
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Collection
Publication
NYRB Classics (2010), Paperback, 256 pages
Description
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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member Marensr
The short stories collected in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick are at times only tangentially related to New York but they all possess the author’s startling and at times brutal ability to cut through the self deceptions and flaws of her characters. There is a sort of wistful
The types of characters in the stories include: a young woman who has finished a Ph.D. only to embark on an ill-conceived romance and remember it occasionally after it has ended. A woman returns to her small town after living in New York only to discover her family was not the way she has imagined them. Another woman compares the way she fictionalized an old flame with the reality of their relationship. A man walks through the New York City streets in winter remembering a time when he was younger and less conservative and imagines bumping into an old flame, the various people who had their house cleaned by a woman for years respond to her death and her family’s request for help with her funeral expenses. A bookseller lives in a state of ambiguous squalor as a succession of helpers file through his shop and his life.
Her stories are like a collection of little pebbles, compact, hard and sharp. It is a collection well worth reading and some of the stories will nag at you long after reading them like a pebble in your shoe.
Note this review refers to an Early Reviewer copy.
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melancholy that pervades most of the short stories. The volume offers up stories in which a chronological succession of stories in which relatively intelligent characters have just enough self-knowledge to realize their own discontentment without being able to change their own behavior or their state in life. There is as sense of displacement and isolation in the stories, which does seem endemic to city life.The types of characters in the stories include: a young woman who has finished a Ph.D. only to embark on an ill-conceived romance and remember it occasionally after it has ended. A woman returns to her small town after living in New York only to discover her family was not the way she has imagined them. Another woman compares the way she fictionalized an old flame with the reality of their relationship. A man walks through the New York City streets in winter remembering a time when he was younger and less conservative and imagines bumping into an old flame, the various people who had their house cleaned by a woman for years respond to her death and her family’s request for help with her funeral expenses. A bookseller lives in a state of ambiguous squalor as a succession of helpers file through his shop and his life.
Her stories are like a collection of little pebbles, compact, hard and sharp. It is a collection well worth reading and some of the stories will nag at you long after reading them like a pebble in your shoe.
Note this review refers to an Early Reviewer copy.
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LibraryThing member angelrose
Arranged chronologically, this collection highlights Hardwick’s development as a storyteller over forty-five years & demonstrates her rare ability to encapsulate entire characters in single sentences, as in “An unpromising child, Susie’s only talent was for making salads that looked like
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ballet dancers.” Show Less
LibraryThing member chuck_ralston
A dozen stories by Elizabeth Hardwick (1916 — 2007), whose sharp eye and biting wit is evident throughout each, are gathered in this New York Review Books edition, with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, author of High Cotton, satiric novel about black (African-American) identity, and Sold and
‘Evenings at Home’ (published 1948) is set in Lexington, Kentucky, Hardwick’s home town, which she left behind for New York, after graduation from the University of Kentucky in 1938, to work toward a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. This autobiographical fiction captures the irony of a sophisticated New York intellectual discovering that her old Kentucky home is truly where the heart is, that she can indeed go home again after a long absence and still feel comfortable with family and friends. Her comfort shifts, however, to unsettled anxiety when she learns that the boy who had been her childhood love still lives in the neighborhood. She recalls her love as “not really love . . . but simply one of those incomprehensible youthful errors” but she still holds her now long-deceased brother, responsible for interfering with her infatuation. After a surprisingly long three weeks at home, it is time to return to New York, but not before visiting the cemetery, more to see its beautiful dogwoods and lilacs than to mourn, with her mother reminding her that “there’s a space for you next to your Brother” and knowing that it is comforting to have these roots.”
‘The Friendly Witness’ (1950) presents the reader with an all too familiar story of small-town political shenanigans involving the mayor and a night club owner who also runs gaming tables. The mayor and club owner, “antipathetic to the bone”, nevertheless share an interest in the education of the mayor’s daughter, such that the club owner matches $500 given by the mayor for his daughter’s education. Thus the perception arrived at by reading the local newspaper that business again is in cahoots with government. (What else is new?) The mayor’s wife and even his personal secretary are embarrassed by the accusations. The mayor, surrounded by negative speculation and feeling the best he could do now would be to make a public statement and resign from his position, is surprised to learn that the witness to the monetary gift, a scion of the community, called news reporters to her home to set the record straight by saying she had indeed witnessed the exchange of money from club owner to mayor, but that the mayor had said clearly that although he could not prevent the club owner from “showing a kindness to his daughter” he still intended to close any gambling establishment regardless. O. Henry would be proud.
Each of this set of Hardwick stories exhibits characters that test the limits of irony, rendering poignant moments into comic relief, passions into reluctant repose, and yearnings into faded, blurred memories. A lover (perhaps) replies to his lover’s question, “Do you really love me?” with “well, yes and no, honey.” A pompous university professor revels amidst colleagues who are know-it-all and above it all, yet his wife unnerves him with her admiration of academics who “give forth on matters never experienced . . . ideas flowing like wine—everything out of books and other people’s lectures, nothing from actual life!” A painter intends to buy a painting of a colleague while making an alibi that is part of his plan to seduce his colleague’s wife. American travelers in Amsterdam (not all of Hardwick’s stories are set exclusively in New York) relish the paradox of cozy domesticity and violent emotional upheavals. “Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long, you seemed to hear the turning of pages: pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire – and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.” And, a book seller, owner of The Pleaide (pronounced wittily as ‘Play Aid’), mulls over his books, not quite read, as well as his customers, who browse, shoplift, and sometimes even buy books. When not among his books and customers, he is in the rear of his shop typing as rapidly as a court stenographer from hand-written index cards, page after page of his latest novel. Shelved behind him are binders filled with perfectly-typed pages comprising thirteen (unpublished) novels. The Pleaide’s stars, for its owner, are Kafka, Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Joyce, Akhmatova, and “old men from Japan with their whores in the snow mountains.” The persistent themes of intimacy and alienation thread these stories together in a warp and weft culminating in Elizabeth Hardwick’s articulate and intelligent cityscape of New York.
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Gone: African-American Literature and U.S. Society. ‘Evenings at Home’ (published 1948) is set in Lexington, Kentucky, Hardwick’s home town, which she left behind for New York, after graduation from the University of Kentucky in 1938, to work toward a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. This autobiographical fiction captures the irony of a sophisticated New York intellectual discovering that her old Kentucky home is truly where the heart is, that she can indeed go home again after a long absence and still feel comfortable with family and friends. Her comfort shifts, however, to unsettled anxiety when she learns that the boy who had been her childhood love still lives in the neighborhood. She recalls her love as “not really love . . . but simply one of those incomprehensible youthful errors” but she still holds her now long-deceased brother, responsible for interfering with her infatuation. After a surprisingly long three weeks at home, it is time to return to New York, but not before visiting the cemetery, more to see its beautiful dogwoods and lilacs than to mourn, with her mother reminding her that “there’s a space for you next to your Brother” and knowing that it is comforting to have these roots.”
‘The Friendly Witness’ (1950) presents the reader with an all too familiar story of small-town political shenanigans involving the mayor and a night club owner who also runs gaming tables. The mayor and club owner, “antipathetic to the bone”, nevertheless share an interest in the education of the mayor’s daughter, such that the club owner matches $500 given by the mayor for his daughter’s education. Thus the perception arrived at by reading the local newspaper that business again is in cahoots with government. (What else is new?) The mayor’s wife and even his personal secretary are embarrassed by the accusations. The mayor, surrounded by negative speculation and feeling the best he could do now would be to make a public statement and resign from his position, is surprised to learn that the witness to the monetary gift, a scion of the community, called news reporters to her home to set the record straight by saying she had indeed witnessed the exchange of money from club owner to mayor, but that the mayor had said clearly that although he could not prevent the club owner from “showing a kindness to his daughter” he still intended to close any gambling establishment regardless. O. Henry would be proud.
Each of this set of Hardwick stories exhibits characters that test the limits of irony, rendering poignant moments into comic relief, passions into reluctant repose, and yearnings into faded, blurred memories. A lover (perhaps) replies to his lover’s question, “Do you really love me?” with “well, yes and no, honey.” A pompous university professor revels amidst colleagues who are know-it-all and above it all, yet his wife unnerves him with her admiration of academics who “give forth on matters never experienced . . . ideas flowing like wine—everything out of books and other people’s lectures, nothing from actual life!” A painter intends to buy a painting of a colleague while making an alibi that is part of his plan to seduce his colleague’s wife. American travelers in Amsterdam (not all of Hardwick’s stories are set exclusively in New York) relish the paradox of cozy domesticity and violent emotional upheavals. “Amsterdam, a city of readers. All night long, you seemed to hear the turning of pages: pages of French, Italian, English, and the despised German. Those fair heads remembered Ovid, Yeats, Baudelaire – and remembered suffering, hiding, freezing. The weight of books and wars.” And, a book seller, owner of The Pleaide (pronounced wittily as ‘Play Aid’), mulls over his books, not quite read, as well as his customers, who browse, shoplift, and sometimes even buy books. When not among his books and customers, he is in the rear of his shop typing as rapidly as a court stenographer from hand-written index cards, page after page of his latest novel. Shelved behind him are binders filled with perfectly-typed pages comprising thirteen (unpublished) novels. The Pleaide’s stars, for its owner, are Kafka, Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Joyce, Akhmatova, and “old men from Japan with their whores in the snow mountains.” The persistent themes of intimacy and alienation thread these stories together in a warp and weft culminating in Elizabeth Hardwick’s articulate and intelligent cityscape of New York.
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LibraryThing member kdcdavis
I was excited to receive this book as my first Early Reviewers win; its summary caught my eye immediately, and my first impression when it finally arrived was promising. However, after reading it I had to wait a few days before posting a review because I wasn't sure what to say.
The stories were
But I didn't like them. Even in the earliest stories, the author's tone was modern and sardonic, and she wrote from a perspective on life that is very different from mine. Everything seemed dreary and hopeless and tired.
Speaking as objectively as possible, these are good short stories, and I think many people would enjoy them--but they're not my style.
The stories were
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well-written. They were interesting. The characters were realistic, and each story was an accurate snapshot of human life and interaction. But I didn't like them. Even in the earliest stories, the author's tone was modern and sardonic, and she wrote from a perspective on life that is very different from mine. Everything seemed dreary and hopeless and tired.
Speaking as objectively as possible, these are good short stories, and I think many people would enjoy them--but they're not my style.
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LibraryThing member jennieg
A book of short stories needs to be read in fits and starts; it is unfair to swallow whole stories that were never meant to be read in a lump. I think I would give these even more space than most short story collections. They are well written, if spare, and pack a punch. But the characters are not
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easy people to be with and the stories are bleak. Show Less
LibraryThing member bookworm12
Whenever I read short story collections I try to space out the individual tales so I have time to digest each one. Elizabeth Hardwick's book spans 50 years, making the stories unique not only in their content, but also in their time periods. They all supposedly center around New York, but some more
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peripherally than others. These aren't uplifting glimpses of the lives of happy people. Their much more realistic and often stark, but their well written, which makes each one fascinating. Show Less
LibraryThing member RoseCityReader
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick is a collection of one dozen stories originally published over Hardwick's career, from the autobiographical "Evenings at Home" (1948) to the darker "Shot: A New York Story" (1993). The stories race along, filled with clever observations and neat turns of
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phrase, but they linger. Show Less
LibraryThing member commodoremarie
If you're a fan of short story collections and perhaps have a postmodernist bent, these may be right up your alley. However, if you're looking for tight, cohesive narratives, you will not find them here.
I admit, I did not particularly enjoy this collection. One of the stories I liked more than the
I'm not sure if it's because of the advance edition I have or not, but there also were innumerably sentences that were missing punctuation, particularly periods.
Other reviewers have clearly liked this edition more than I have, and perhaps have a preexisting familiarity with the style of the writer from her other works. What these readers appear to like - i.e., her single-sentence character summaries - are the same things that made this slim 206-page volume take me longer than my usual time to get through a novel three times the length.
I admit, I did not particularly enjoy this collection. One of the stories I liked more than the
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others, but none of them enough to recommend the whole. They ramble on a bit, wandering off and forgetting cogent details, each seeming to search for it's center. Not one of the narratives gives the reader something substantive to sink his teeth into, and by the last they seem even more flighty and wistful. I'm not sure if it's because of the advance edition I have or not, but there also were innumerably sentences that were missing punctuation, particularly periods.
Other reviewers have clearly liked this edition more than I have, and perhaps have a preexisting familiarity with the style of the writer from her other works. What these readers appear to like - i.e., her single-sentence character summaries - are the same things that made this slim 206-page volume take me longer than my usual time to get through a novel three times the length.
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LibraryThing member CBJames
"The Oak and the Axe" is the fifth story in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick and the first one I liked. The story concerns Clara, a middle aged woman, recently divorced, successful at the magazine where she is the food editor, able to afford the lifestyle she wants. Clara meets Henry
There's a meanness about "The Oak and the Axe" that I found troubling. The story is satire; we're not meant to feel sorry for Clara or for Henry. Clara is basically cold, a person kept so busy by her struggle to keep everything at work perfect that she cannot make a marriage successful. Her first husband leaves her for his secretary while she is still quite young. They have no children. When she falls for Henry she is falling for her opposite, a ne'er-do-well, lazy, unambitious man incapable of concerted effort, but a man whom other people feel sorry for in a way no one would ever feel for Clara.
She's just too easy a target. Satirizing women like her is like shooting fish in a barrel. While I found it good fun when Dorothy Parker did it, it feels uncomfortable here. "The Oak and The Axe" was published in 1956, just a few years before Sylvia Plath would rip the lid off of the world of women's magazines in The Bell Jar. Maybe Clara should be read as a precursor to Esther Greenwood. But I suspect Esther would have been horrified by Clara.
Ms. Hardwick was one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, which has published this collection. Her stories appeared there and in The New Yorker and The Partisan Review. They seem to be just the sort of thing for their readers. Satirical and sardonic, the kind of story Dorothy Parker would approve of, though I think Ms. Parker did it better.
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Dean, a single man with a great deal of promise. Henry, the son of wealth, has the aristocratic air her more successful first husband lacked. Henry has no substantial wealth; he is "retired on 250 a month." Age 47, he hasn't done anything of note yet, but Clara is convinced he will. She has so much faith in him that she asks him to marry her.There's a meanness about "The Oak and the Axe" that I found troubling. The story is satire; we're not meant to feel sorry for Clara or for Henry. Clara is basically cold, a person kept so busy by her struggle to keep everything at work perfect that she cannot make a marriage successful. Her first husband leaves her for his secretary while she is still quite young. They have no children. When she falls for Henry she is falling for her opposite, a ne'er-do-well, lazy, unambitious man incapable of concerted effort, but a man whom other people feel sorry for in a way no one would ever feel for Clara.
She's just too easy a target. Satirizing women like her is like shooting fish in a barrel. While I found it good fun when Dorothy Parker did it, it feels uncomfortable here. "The Oak and The Axe" was published in 1956, just a few years before Sylvia Plath would rip the lid off of the world of women's magazines in The Bell Jar. Maybe Clara should be read as a precursor to Esther Greenwood. But I suspect Esther would have been horrified by Clara.
Ms. Hardwick was one of the founders of The New York Review of Books, which has published this collection. Her stories appeared there and in The New Yorker and The Partisan Review. They seem to be just the sort of thing for their readers. Satirical and sardonic, the kind of story Dorothy Parker would approve of, though I think Ms. Parker did it better.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Kasthu
The New York Stories is a collection of stories that Elizabeth Hardwick published between 1946 and 1993—years that spanned nearly her entire career as a writer. Hardwick grew up in Kentucky and lived for many years in New York City, working as an essayist for the New York Review of Books. She was
There is a theme to these stories; all of them deal to some extent with the idea of escape, whether a character escapes from New York back to her Kentucky childhood home or escapes a sour relationship. Although Hardwick claimed that she couldn’t write much about what she knew, this is a theme from her life that appears over and over again in these stories. Hardwick herself did a fair amount of escaping—escape from small-town life in Kentucky to go to New York.
The stories are arranged in order of publication date, and they show Hardwick’s evolution as a writer. That’s why a story about (somewhat pretentious) young intellectual women coincide with a story about an antique shop worker who disappoints his desperate girlfriend. I like the eclectic combination; there is always something new in every story. The essence of New York is very strong in these stories; and, because these stories were written over a period of nearly 50 years, it’s interesting to watch the city develop.
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married briefly to the poet Robert Lowell, who after their divorce married Caroline Blackwood, leading Hardwick to quip, “he never married a bad writer.” She was also friends for many years with the writer Mary McCarthy and lampooned her 1963 novel The Group.There is a theme to these stories; all of them deal to some extent with the idea of escape, whether a character escapes from New York back to her Kentucky childhood home or escapes a sour relationship. Although Hardwick claimed that she couldn’t write much about what she knew, this is a theme from her life that appears over and over again in these stories. Hardwick herself did a fair amount of escaping—escape from small-town life in Kentucky to go to New York.
The stories are arranged in order of publication date, and they show Hardwick’s evolution as a writer. That’s why a story about (somewhat pretentious) young intellectual women coincide with a story about an antique shop worker who disappoints his desperate girlfriend. I like the eclectic combination; there is always something new in every story. The essence of New York is very strong in these stories; and, because these stories were written over a period of nearly 50 years, it’s interesting to watch the city develop.
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Language
Original publication date
2010
Physical description
256 p.; 7.98 inches
ISBN
1590172876 / 9781590172872