Brief Lives

There are two clocks in the world, he thought, one inside the other, and it is that one, the smaller, that decides things. In a garrulous age, here is plenitude by compression. Brief Lives combines the emotional density of poetry with the detail and drive of prose. Some stories leap at speed across time and place; others deepen around a single incident: a widow kills a bird and phones her dead husband; a teenage murderess grows up to marry her psychiatrist; a Bosnian man falls into the past while raking leaves. Room is left for mystery without loss of intimacy. Hazzard's distillations portray psychological complexities self-devouring hungers, dry rots of soul, the little and large displacements that crack people open through a lens as compassionate as it is surprising.