Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges, and Pessoa—utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.

Colm Tóibín

Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer.

cover image of the book Covert Joy: Selected Stories

Covert Joy: Selected Stories

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Katrina Dodson

With a contribution by Rachel Kushner

This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story:

Joy would always be covert for me. . . Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.

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cover image of the book The Besieged City

The Besieged City

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

With a contribution by Benjamin Moser

Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector’s heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: “Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.”

“The object—the thing,” Lispector once remarked, “always fascinated me and in a certain sense destroyed me. In my book The Besieged City I speak indirectly about the mystery of the thing. The thing is a specialized and immobilized animal.

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cover image of the book The Apple in the Dark

The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Benjamin Moser

With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel Valente

“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 scintillating light.

Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal jungle: stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival, but are affected by his radical mystery. Soaked through with Martim’s inner night (his soul is in the darkness where everything is created), the novel vibrates with his perpetual searching state of vigil. Often he feels close to an epiphany: “for the first time he was present in the moment in which whatever is happening is happening.” Yet such flashes flicker out, so he’s ever on the watch for “life to take on the dimensions of a destiny.”

In an interview, Lispector once said: “I am Martim.” As she puts it in The Apple in the Dark: “All I’ve got is hunger. And that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark—without letting it fall.”

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cover image of the book The Woman Who Killed the Fish

The Woman Who Killed the Fish

“That woman who killed the fish unfortunately is me,” begins the title story, but “if it were my fault, I’d own up to you, since I don’t lie to boys and girls. I only lie sometimes to a certain type of grownup because there’s no other way.” Enumerating all the animals she’s loved—cats, dogs, lizards, chickens, monkeys—Clarice finally asks: “Do you forgive me?”

“The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit” is a detective story which explains that bunnies think with their noses: for a single idea a bunny might “scrunch up his nose fifteen thousand times” (he may not be too bright, but “he’s not foolish at all when it comes to making babies”). The third tale, “Almost True,” is a shaggy dog yarn narrated by a pooch who is very worried about a wicked witch: “I am a dog named Ulisses and my owner is Clarice.” The wonderful last story, “Laura’s Intimate Life” stars “the nicest hen I’ve ever seen.” Laura is “quite dumb,” but she has her “little thoughts and feelings. Not a lot, but she’s definitely got them. Just knowing she’s not completely dumb makes her feel all chatty and giddy. She thinks that she thinks.” A one-eyed visitor from Jupiter arrives and vows Laura will never be eaten: she’s been worrying, because “humans are a weird sort of person” who can love hens and eat them, too. Such throwaway wisdom abounds: “Don’t even get me started.” These delightful, high-hearted stories, written for her own boys, have charm to burn—and are a treat for every Lispector reader.

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cover image of the book Too Much of Life

Too Much of Life

The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too. 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 and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love. This new, large, and beautifully translated volume, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas presents a new aspect of the great writer—at once off the cuff and spot on.

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cover image of the book An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Stefan Tobler

Edited by Benjamin Moser

Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”

Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.

Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

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cover image of the book The Hour of the Star

The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Benjamin Moser

With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel Valente and Colm Tóibín

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

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cover image of the book The Besieged City

The Besieged City

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Edited by Benjamin Moser

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel—the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals—is in English at last.

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 takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficiality—her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlor—that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on “the mystery of the thing.”

Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector’s own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century’s greatest writers—and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.

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cover image of the book The Chandelier

The Chandelier

The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.”

Virgínia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virgínia’s internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virgínia’s thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”—and displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth.

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cover image of the book The Complete Stories

The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Katrina Dodson

With a contribution by Benjamin Moser

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 and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don’t know what to do with themselves— and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives—and hers—and ours.

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cover image of the book Near to the Wild Heart

Near to the Wild Heart

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Alison Entrekin

Edited by Benjamin Moser

Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.”

The book was an unprecedented sensation — the discovery of genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”

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cover image of the book A Breath of Life

A Breath of Life

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Edited by Benjamin Moser

A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published. At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by a friend, Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well.

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cover image of the book The Passion According to G.H.

The Passion According to G.H.

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Idra Novey

Edited by Benjamin Moser

Introduction by Caetano Veloso

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 which comes one of the most famous and most genuinely shocking scenes in Latin American literature. Clarice Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

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cover image of the book Água Viva

Água Viva

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Stefan Tobler

Edited by Benjamin Moser

A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

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cover image of the book The Hour of the Star

The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Benjamin Moser

With a contribution by Colm Tóibín

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

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cover image of the book Selected Cronicas

Selected Cronicas

The chronicle, a literary genre peculiar to the Brazilian press, allows poets and novelists to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Lispector’s Saturday column from 1967 to 1973 in Rio’s leading newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil, was even by Brazilian standards extraordinarily free-ranging and intimate—astonishingly so to readers of US newspapers. The 156 crônicas collected here (variously taking the form of serialized stories, essays, aphorisms, conversations with taxi drivers, random thoughts, introspective revelations, memories) are endlessly delightful. Her insights make one sit up and think, whether about pets or children or society women or love or the business of writing.

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cover image of the book The Foreign Legion

The Foreign Legion

The Foreign Legion is a collection in two parts, gathering both stories and chronicles, and it offers wonderful evidence of Clarice Lispector’s unique sensibility and range as an exponent of experimental prose. The Foreign Legion opens with thirteen stories. Delightful, vivid, sometimes mordantly funny, sometimes sad beyond words, the tales bear out The New York Times comment that “Lispector makes language the medium of both imprisonment and liberation… and she does it with an amazingly light and playful touch.” The second part of the book presents her newspaper crônicas, which Lispector said she retrieved from a bottom drawer. She offered them as shards, as suggestions, but they are in fact brilliant essays on Brazilian art and society, evocations of her world, conversations with her children, aphorisms – a rich miscellany. Together the stories and chronicles create a showcase of Lispector’s talents to amuse and disturb.

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cover image of the book Soulstorm

Soulstorm

The twenty-nine stories in Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm were originally published in two separate volumes in 1974––The Stations of the Body and Where You Were at Night––and are now combined for the first time and sensitively translated into English by Alexis Levitin. The realm of Lispector’s fiction is the inner life; self-knowledge is her main concern. Like James Joyce’s Dubliners, her characters live small stifled lives, often unaware of their own suffering, but her lucid and richly textured narratives allow us, the readers, the epiphanies that they themselves are denied.

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Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before. One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges, and Pessoa—utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.

Colm Tóibín

The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century.

Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

No two columns are alike: strands of dialogue, observed scenes, diaristic entries, life advice, even the author admiring herself in the mirror…Too Much of Life is a huge addition to an already impressive collection of evidence that Lispector could transcribe a guestbook and make it interesting.

J. Howard Rosier, Vulture

For those unfamiliar with her, this book opens a door into her uniquely challenging and rewarding body of work. Stretching over a decade – and across nearly 800 pages – the pieces, some amounting to a few sentences, some many pages long, make up a self-portrait in bits and pieces. The result is, like Lispector herself, witty, mystical, surreal and profound: a treasure to return to again and again.

Madoc Cairns, The Guardian

[T]his is Clarice Lispector as one-woman chorus and psychic weather forecaster, and the charm, wit and engagement that she brings to her columns transcends barriers

John Biscello, Riot Material

Readers will delight in this short collection of luminous, laugh-out-loud stories from the late Brazilian cult writer Lispector…Though the author wrote these stories for her son when he was a child, and they often contain magic and lack in explanations, their small delights nonetheless rank high among Lispector’s impressive body of work. In between the lines of these spellbinding worlds, she offers indelible glimpses of the way people live and dream. Even amid the silliest of scenarios are glimmers of the beauty of the everyday: “That’s how life went on. Gently, gently.” This is one to savor.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

In 1967, Brazil’s leading newspaper asked the avant-garde writer Lispector to write a weekly column on any topic she wished. For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were… Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era’s most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths. Superb, wonderfully obsessed with exuberance and what it unlocks and reveals.”

Publishers Weekly, starred

Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the 21st century.

Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

A genius on the level of Nabokov.

Jeff Vandermeer, Slate

Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich.

Lily Meyer, NPR

Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century.

Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

This new translation of The Hour of the Star reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a young naïf, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and love.

Meghan O’Grady, Vogue

I’m really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens—she describes the air. I think she’s such a great, great novelist.

John Waters

Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other. Lispector, on the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and excited readers.

Colm Tóibín

This new translation of The Hour of the Star reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a young naïf, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and love.

Vogue

This is a fictional account of a woman’s attempt to escape from conventional time and exist instead in a perpetually renewing “this instant-now”. Lispector pursued this same seemingly impossible aim through a number of books – getting closer and closer to the confused and thrilling feeling of fully conscious aliveness. Água Viva is where she succeeds most amazingly.

Toby Litt, The Guardian

I’m really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens—she describes the air. I think she’s such a great, great novelist.

John Waters

Lispector’s prose lilts and sways, its rhythm shakes at once with closeness and distance. The sensory power Lispector is able to draw from her sentences is here given free rein and the descriptive character of the text is wild with excess, seeking to imbue everything simultaneously with solidity, material presence, and transience, fluidity.

Music & Literature

Lispector’s signature narrative style, which borders on stream-of-consciousness, is the vehicle for Virginia’s existential dilemmas and her observations about a world from which she often seems removed. The Chandelier includes all the earmarks of Lispector’s other work, too: a deep anguish, a search for the heart of human existence, and the unbearable weight of a solitude that is imperative to ultimate freedom.

Americas Quarterly

A breathless, dizzying and multi­sensory dive into the mind.

The Times Literary Supplement

Reading Lispector is deceptively easy because of the pleasurable momentum, range, and freshness of her storylines.

Women's Review of Books

Confident and unexpected.

Max Nelson, Boston Review

These stories eschew traditional notions of plot, relying instead on eccentric shifts and juxtapositions that force the reader to approach the narratives obliquely, at an unfamiliar angle.

Stephen Beattie, The Globe and Mail

No matter how small or large the subject — a girl’s love of her pet chicken who subsequently gets eaten, a first kiss between classmates, or a discontent housewife’s daydreams — they become magnified in her hands.

Fiona Wilson, The Times UK

Mystic intelligence and charm, perfectly unhinged sensibility.

James Yeh, VICE

You could call Lispector’s stories telegraphs from the flames of hell, but that would discount how innocent and funny they could be. Manna from the shtetl? Prayers at the high-rise window before the tranquilizers kick in? You will not be disappointed if you read The Complete Stories. It might even become your bible.

Benjamin Anastas, The New Republic

Her early work already reads like the mature productions of most writers. Each story demands such attention. Lispector never repeats a subject or an approach except to push it further. Moser, in his introduction, calls her a ‘female Chekhov’, but Lispector is no one so much as the fullest version of herself.

Joanna Walsh, The National

For readers who worship at the altar of Lispector, the appearance of new work in translation is an event…Calling the release of Lispector’s Complete Stories in English an ’epiphany’ in its promotional copy may sound like hyperbole. It’s not.

The Millions

Startlingly innovative.

Elissa Shappel, Vanity Fair

To fans, Lispector is simply ‘Clarice,’ like Cher or Madonna or her countryman, Pele.

Brenda Cronin, The Wall Street Journal

She has been variously likened to such modernist writers as Nabokov, Borges and Calvino, and the strange and mesmerizing stories here confirm her stature.

Newsday

A genius on the level of Nabokov.

Jeff VanderMeer, Slate Book Review

The elusive genius who dramatized a fractured interior world in rich, synesthetic prose.

Megan O'Grady, Vogue

Lispector reads with lively intelligence and is terrifically funny. Language, for her, was the self’s light.

Lorrie Moore

Clarice Lispector had a diamond-hard intelligence, a visionary instinct, and a sense of humor that veered from naïf wonder to wicked comedy.

Rachel Kushner

I felt physically jolted by genius.

Katherine Boo

[Lispector] left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it.

Rachel Kushner, Bookforum

We now finally have a translation worthy of Clarice Lispector’s inimitable style. Go out and buy it.

The Guardian

One of 20th-century Brazil’s most intriguing and mystifying writers.

The L Magazine

Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself.

The Times Literary Supplement

Writing like this could only be the product of a sublime creative purge, an incomprehensible, compulsive flowing-out response to the raw intake of being human and everything that that is and means.

The Brooklyn Rail

Lispector’s prose is unforgettable… still startling by the end because of Lispector’s unsettling forcefulness.

The Boston Globe

Lispector’s novels offer a stark counterpoint to much of modern life’s focus on individual fame.

The Boston Globe

It is jarring and yet restorative to read a writer whose focus is so private, internal.

The Boston Globe

Both dazzling and difficult.

San Francisco Chronicle

Lispector is an author that requires the reader’s full participation, but the rewards are sizable.

Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review

It is Lispector’s attempt — successful, I would say — to sacralize one of the vilest quantities in the Western world.

Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review

That Lispector could write such a complete and satisfying coming-of-age story at twenty-three is proof — were any needed — that she was always ahead of the game.

Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review

This is a book that, like a good painting, can be picked up anywhere and that will continue to reward renewed contact over months and years of acquaintance.

Scott Esposito, Barnes & Noble Review

The New Directions Lispector translation project is an incredibly important contribution to the canon of world literature.

The Coffin Factory

This text investigates the knowledge of not knowing and the rich poverty of the inner void with stratagems of obfuscation, leaps of language, and suspensions of syntax and form that are perhaps best received by the gut.

Catherine Foulkrod, The Faster Times

Lispector’s brilliant intellect spins inquiry and philosophy on par with the best writers of the 20th century.

Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

Even to a reader first encountering her work, there’s a feeling of encountering something completely new and classic at the same time.

Time Out Chicago

It is the primal, illogical experience beyond thought that Lispector and her protagonists crave.

ZYZZYVA

One of the most audacious and affecting works of fiction I’ve ever read.

Ben Fountain, Barnes & Noble Review

Brilliant and unclassifiable…Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce.

Edmund White

Over time, I’ve come to admire and even love this novel. In fact, as soon as I slammed the book shut, my understanding of G.H.’s story began to take on an almost-corporeal reality.

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, Tin House

A new translation of The Hour of the Star by Lispector’s biographer Benjamin Moser reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a young naïf, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and love.

Megan O’Grady, Vogue.com

The only antidote to stupidity is an agitated intelligence constantly prowling for blank spots in one’s outward seeming. The Hour of the Star is a romance, then, between stupidity and its neurotic observer, a restless stretching away from form, tradition, and the stupefying rules they impose on writing.

The New Inquiry

A truly remarkable writer.

Jonathan Franzen

…filled with jagged, jerky odd, and utterly compelling prose, which is how it should be according to Moser.

Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly

Clarice Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of the century.

New York Times Book Review

Lispector’s intensity makes her a natural short story writer…

Times Literary Supplement

One might have thought that so stern a ’new novelist’ would scorn the chatty style required. Far from it: Lispector discovered her own extraordinary idiom–intimate, revelatory, mystificatory. This flirtation with her readers was a triumphant metamorphosis for the avant-garde author.

Times Literary Supplement

Better than Borges.

Elizabeth Bishop

Lispector should be on the shelf with Kafka and Joyce.

Los Angeles Times
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