Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) was an Australian-born novelist and essayist who spent much of her life in New York City, Capri, and Naples. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus (1980), acclaimed as her masterpiece, and the National Book Award for The Great Fire (2003). Donald Keene (1922–2019) was Shincho Professor Emeritus of Japanese Literature at Columbia University, where he taught for more than fifty years. He wrote dozens of books, including the definitive multivolume history of Japanese literature. In 2011, he gave up his U.S. citizenship and became a Japanese citizen. Brigitta Olubas is professor of English at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is the author of Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (2022), as well as the editor of Hazzard’s collected stories and selected nonfiction.
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 <i>Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather</i>