Confident and unexpected.

Max Nelson, Boston Review

Lispector’s breakthrough debut novel

Near to the Wild Heart

by Clarice Lispector

Translated from Portuguese 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.”

Paperback(published Jun, 13 2012)

ISBN
9780811220026
Price US
15.95
Price CN
17
Page Count
192

Ebook(published Jun, 13 2012)

ISBN
9780811220712
Price US
15.95
Portrait of Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector

20th-century Brazilian writer

Confident and unexpected.

Max Nelson, Boston Review

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

The Guardian

After reading Near to the Wild Heart, one thing is easy to understand: Lispector wasn’t called ‘Hurricane Clarice’ because of her breakthrough into the literary scene, but because her words tear into your mind and leave a trail of devastation.

The Coffin Factory

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

The Boston Globe

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

After reading Near to the Wild Heart, one thing is easy to understand: Lispector wasn’t called ‘Hurricane Clarice’ because of her breakthrough into the literary scene, but because her words tear into your mind and leave a trail of devastation.

The Coffin Factory

A truly remarkable writer.

Jonathan Franzen

You could breeze through it, you could let it marinate, or you could reread it twice in one sitting.

Kathleen Creedon, Vanity Fair