From the massive treasure house of her hugely successful Complete Stories, gathered here are the most glittering gems of Clarice Lispector’s short fiction
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.
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
Lispector reads with lively intelligence and is terrifically funny. Language, for her, was the self’s light.
— Lorrie Moore
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.
