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...

The first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades.

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. She covered civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, places where she lived, locations she traveled to, theater she had seen, and murder trials that gripped her. She wrote sketches for various occasions and countless essays about literature, her greatest passion. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor. The continuous attention to language, the...

Here are luminous sketches of characters she has met, of transgressive and often tragic women - prostitutes and mothers, spinsters and celebrities, famous writers and the homeless - that illuminate the era's racism, sexism, and poverty. Above all, here is prose blurring into poetry, language to lose - and perhaps to find - yourself in.

These magnetic essays are nothing less than a reckoning, dissecting relations between the sexes, women and writing, work and life. Hardwick's provocative essays were first published in 1974 and won loyal admiration from writers including Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick, Derek Walcott, and Joyce Carol Oates.