Open Letters Monthly mourns the death of Shirley Hazzard, whose steeply smart writing - fiction and nonfiction, and particularly the stalking, unsettling complexity of The Transit of Venus - happened at its own pace and hewed to its own imperatives. When an editor, coming up for air from a typically intricate passage in one of her manuscripts, once innocently asked, "Might we make this bit a little friendlier?" she responded: "I should think not." She'll be greatly missed.
