"Hardwick wrote when she had something to say, and she took her time; the impression of ease is owing strictly to her style. Not a poet, she produced a poet's prose..." -
The Guardian (London)
"An odd, original talent, Elizabeth Hardwick writes with a tremendous subtlety and a fine drawn sensibility of common frailties." –
Kirkus Reviews "Nobody writing prose now gives me as much pleasure as Elizabeth Hardwick. She honors our language and enlivens our woe." –Susan Sontag
"Hardwick is, characteristically without ostentation or polemics, a gifted miniaturist biographer." –Joyce Carol Oates
"Elizabeth Hardwick died in 2007, but her influence can still be felt in any writer who knows that a story or essay's tone is based as much on a word's weight, and the rhythm of a paragraph, as it is on thesis and intention....In the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, Hardwick has a brilliant champion. He has gathered together the best of Hardwick's short fiction in
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, and, in his powerful and insightful introduction, he expresses something of the charm of the woman–and her great struggles to produce stories that reflected her unique process of intellection, her engagement in the world of ideas. " – Hilton Als,
The New Yorker
