Expatriates of No Country
The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene
Donald Keene author Shirley Hazzard author Brigitta Olubas editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Published:22nd Oct '24
Should be back in stock very soon
For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Brought together by the death of a mutual friend in the late 1970s, they discovered a profound connection built on mutual affinities for literature and culture and common values of humanism and cosmopolitanism.
Expatriates of No Country presents Hazzard and Keene’s correspondence, offering readers a new and intimate perspective on the work and achievements of these towering figures. Both left behind their countries of birth, and they shared experiences of displacement, estrangement, and fashioning new lives and selves in adopted homelands. Hazzard, who departed from Australia as a teenager without completing her formal education, led an expatriate life in New York and Italy as she attained literary fame. Keene, a pacifist who served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II, devoted himself to the literature and culture of Japan, where he became revered. Their erudite and elegantly written letters trace the larger story of their friendship, finding striking overlaps between their distinctive worlds. Recording a vanished way of literary and intellectual life, Expatriates of No Country casts a new light on two extraordinary people through their unlikely connection.
The extensive, decades-long correspondence between Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene—superbly edited by Brigitta Olubas—opens many doors into the cosmopolitan life, psyche, and literary genius of Shirley Hazzard. Her letters to Donald Keene contain some of her very best prose. Keene’s letters in turn are full of erudition and insight. A treasure trove for those who love these two authors. -- Robert Pogue Harrison, author of Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age
These letters read like a primer in the art of friendship. For thirty years Hazzard and Keene inspired each other in letters flung like filaments between Tokyo, New York, Naples, Capri, and Rome. Cosmopolitan humanists, they never forgot the monstrosity of war as they shared their devotions to art, literature, and music. A precious testament to the life of the mind and the heart. -- Rosanna Warren, author of Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters
This book is a dual portrait of two supremely cultivated and original people. Olubas beautifully captures the nineteenth-century fullness of the letters exchanged. I found myself swept up by the sheer drama, wondering what these two rare birds would say next. -- Benjamin Taylor, author of Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather
This collection of correspondence between the novelist Shirley Hazzard and the scholar and translator Donald Keene is an exercise in high-minded curiosity and sophisticated largesse. * Times Literary Supplement *
ISBN: 9780231214452
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages