Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene

This niche collection chronicles the 30-year friendship of novelist Shirley Hazzard (1931–2016) and Japanese literature scholar Donald Keene (1922–2019), who met at a memorial for a mutual friend in 1977. The two bonded over their itinerant lifestyles (Hazzard was an Australian living between New York and Italy and Keene a New Yorker who traveled frequently to Japan), with Keene contending that “rootless cosmopolitanism... is the only way we can avoid the madness of nationalism.” The vagaries of the writing life feature prominently, with Keene recounting his squabbles with a copy editor he claimed didn’t understand the purpose of his manuscript about Japanese diaries throughout history, and Hazzard complaining that “in twenty years of producing books, I’ve yet to hear from a publisher that it was ‘a good time’ to publish.” The letters include some insights into Hazzard’s creative process. For instance, messages from Hazzard asking Keene for historical details about the U.S. occupation of Japan after WWII shed light on the research process for her 2003 National Book Award winner, The Great Fire. Unfortunately, frequent discussion of such mundane details as the weather and the logistics of meeting up make for dry reading. This is for Hazzard completists only. (Oct.)