Clarice Lispector

"One of the most phenomenally acclaimed and successful books of recent years is now available as a paperback--with three just-discovered stories. Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual...

"Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier in 1946 with her second novel, The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. "It stands out," her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, "in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book." Of glacial intensity,...

Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors--soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus--are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with São Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, São Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive--a viaduct--it...

G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters her maid's room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door on it. The sight of the dying insect provokes a mystical crisis, at the height of which comes one of the most famous and genuinely shocking scenes in Latin American literature. Clarice Lispector wrote that of all of her works this novel was the one that "best corresponded to her demands as a writer."

""It's the best one," Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: "I can't define it, how it is, I can only say that it's much better constructed than the previous ones." A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fact highly sculpted, while being chiefly a metaphysical book, and in this stunning new translation, the novel's mysteries and allegories glow with a fresh...

"The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector's pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio's leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up...