New York Stories

Resumen del libro

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.

Biografía del autor

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) se educó en las universidades de Kentucky y Columbia, en donde también trabajó como profesora en las décadas de 1970 y 1980. Cofundadora y directora de The New York Review of Books, publicó la biografía de Herman Melville y tres novelas (The Ghostly Lover, 1945, The Simple Truth, 1955, y Noches insomnes, 1979). Pero fue sobre todo su labor como crítica y ensayista la que le valió el mayor reconocimiento y la Medalla de Oro de la Academia Estadounidense de Artes y Letras.