We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays

These nonfiction works span from the 1960s to the 2000s and were produced by one of the great fiction writers of the period. They add critical depth to Shirley Hazzard’s creative world and encapsulate her extensive and informed thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They also offer greater access to her brilliant craftsmanship and the multiple registers in which her writings operate. Hazzard writes about the manifold failings of the United Nations, where she worked in the early 1950s. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She presents her thoughts on the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature. These works contribute to a keener understanding of postwar letters, thought, and politics, supported by an introduction that situates Hazzard’s writing within its historical context and emphasizes her influence on world literature. This collection confirms Hazzard’s place within a network of writers, artists, and intellectuals who believe in the ongoing power of literature to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite—or maybe because of—the world’s disheartening realities.

About the Author :
Shirley Hazzard won the National Book Award for her 2003 novel The Great Fire and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus. She is the author of The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, which was nominated for the Lost Booker Prize; Greene on Capri, a memoir of Graham Greene; and People in Glass Houses, based on her time at the United Nations. She lives in New York City and Capri. Brigitta Olubas is associate professor of English in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. She is the editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and the author of Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist.

Review :
With magisterial clarity and froideur, Hazzard excoriates the U.N.'s complicity in censoring Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago," its whitewashing of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past and its wider silence about countless human-rights abuses.-- "Wall Street Journal" A rich, urbane, insightful collection.-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" Hazzard employs language like a knife, with precision and incisiveness.... What comes through most clearly is Hazzard's delight in the English language and its capacity for expression and communication.-- "Publishers Weekly" Hazzard's essays are full of crystalline turns of phrase and aphoristic expressions of her core humanist principles--as well as of revealing, often fascinating, political contradictions. Scholars and students of Hazzard will strike gold.--Claire Seiler, Dickinson College Her fiction, with its stylistic elegance and intellectual verve, is quite enough to warrant our admiration.-- "Los Angeles Review of Books" In these essays there is a lovely sense of witnessing a brilliant and judicious mind at work. Shirley Hazzard has a way of finding the right phrase, and capturing a tone and a rhythm, that offer a sort of sensuous pleasure to the reader. She cares passionately about writing, the life of the mind, and also the public realm. As in her novels, her essays display the quality of her sympathy, her ability to make distinctions as well as connections, and her acute analysis. She is an inspiring presence in our literary lives, and having these essays is both a gift and a revelation.--Colm Tóibín Absorbing.... Illuminating.... Throughout this brief, captivating collection, which also includes essays on literature, history, and travel, Hazzard is articulate and humane.--Rona Cran "Times Literary Supplement" An elegant and cultured collection.--Andy Miller "The Spectator" Breathtaking and challenging.--Sarah Murdoch "The Toronto Star" This book shows that Hazzard is a fierce defender of the humanistic belief in the efficacy of literature (especially poetry) and art to illuminate the truth and to provide meaningful insight into the mystery of human existence.--Michael Collier, author of An Individual History We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think manages the difficult task of making old-school, mid-century liberal humanism feel alive, urgent and necessary once again.--Geordie Williamson "The Australian" From We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think, Shirley Hazzard emerges, to paraphrase Olubas, as eloquent, thoughtful, civil, and intellectually generous.--Brian Matthews "Australian Book Review"