Clarice Lispector

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 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. And she did.

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-Colas, 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. 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 leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

"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

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.

"This book demanded an ampler freedom that I was afraid to allow it. It is far above me. Humbly I have tried to write it. It is stronger than I am." Clarice Lispector

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.

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector's mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid's room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door — crushing the cockroach — and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in brazilian literature…

Clarice Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

Martin is convinced that he has murdered his wife. In a delirium of guilt and grief, he wanders through a forest until he comes across an isolated farm run by Vitoria - an indomitable spinster who is 'afraid to live', and her flighty, obsessive cousin Ermelinda, who is terrified of death. As Martin works on Vitoria's land he is both haunted and comforted by memories of his wife and son. In the intense heat of the Brazilian summer, drought threatens both the farm and its inhabitants, and these three very different but equally domineering characters provoke each other into a realisation of their individual psychological isolation.

‘This existential epic of a desperate criminal … stands among Lispector’s finest and most enigmatic achievements.’ Publishers Weekly

‘[A] mind-bending, metaphysical novel of the psyche. … What makes this novel so continually surprising is Lispector’s unflinching fascination with the minute and sensual qualities of being alive. Perfect and mysterious.’ Max Gray, The Chicago Review of Books

‘An experimental novel about becoming, existing, and being remade: seductive.’ Kirkus Reviews

‘What in other hands might make for the premise behind a noir novel, Clarice Lispector uses to explore metaphysical questions of being, of existence expressed in a coiling language in which concrete nouns torque into abstract conceptions pushing sense to the limits of coherence…The Apple in the Dark represents Lispector at the height of her creative powers.’ Tom Bowden, The Book Beat

‘[Lispector weaves] a scant storyline out of dense and iridescent metaphysical description in a structural style she would later perfect: a narrative thin in exterior movements but pregnant with interior vibration, where the climax, though deliberately put off, reaches a well-earned catharsis when it finally arrives. … The Apple in the Dark introduces [her style] in its purist, unfiltered form. … In preserving Lispector’s idiosyncrasies, Moser shows the luster of her occult brilliance.’ Helen Ruby Hill, The Rumpus

‘May we all, after reading The Apple in the Dark, ‘stand in the calm profundity of the mystery.’ Carlos Valladares, Frieze

Clarice Lispector’s third book is unlike any of her other novels—it even has a happy ending.

The story of a bustling Brazilian suburb in the 1920s, as seen through the eyes of Lucretia. Hungry for freedom, but tied down by a widowed, self-pitying mother and inappropriate suitors, Lucretia tries both marriage and infidelity. A widow, she returns to the reality of Sao Geraldo.

"Clarice Lispector wrote The Besieged City in Switzerland (“a cemetery of sensations”), where her diplomat husband was posted, in 1948. “What saved me from the monotony of Bern,” Clarice stated, “was living in the Middle Ages and writing The Besieged City … my gratitude to that book is enormous: the effort of writing it saved my life.”Perhaps written in flight from the “shipwreck of introspection,” it is a book unlike any other in the Lispector canon, a novel about simply seeing the external world. Its heroine Lucrécia is utterly mute and unreflective. She may have no inner life.Moreover, the plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative: small town gal marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after.That said, there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters’ visions, music from unknown sources. But centrally, there is Lucrécia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who “leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly.” And yet her “mere” looking leads, as Lispector’s biographer Benjamin Moser notes, “paradoxically but inevitably, to Clarice’s own metaphysical concerns. As it turns out, not being profound is simply another way of being profound.” New Directions

"Beautiful."—Los Angeles Times 

"Dreamlike, dense, original, this challenging novel has a cumulative power. Highly recommended." —Kirkus (starred review)

"Brilliant, demanding, tempestuous, relentless, exultant.” —Martin Riker, The New York Times

 

"Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster, the revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century. Glittering and savage." —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Lispector made her own rules, free of the world’s constraints, and here, in her third novel, an ordinary story and apparently shallow protagonist are no impediments to formidable experiment…Having read her, one feels different, elated.” —Booklist 

“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, WM Magazine

“Lispector’s novel offers a pristine view of an ordinary life, told in her forceful, one-of-a-kind voice that captures isolated moments with poetic intensity.”—Publishers Weekly

“Lispector’s prose lilts and sways, its rhythm shakes at once withcloseness 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

“Underneath Lispector’s inventive, modernist style is a poignant and radical depiction of a young woman navigating a patriarchal society.”—The Paris Review

This second book by Clarice Lispector dazzles to the point of confusing while also illuminating crucial aspects of her fiction. It tells the story of what is probably an incestuous relationship between siblings Virginia and Daniel, and Virginia’s safe solitude, which she uses to construct all shapes of what is real, distorting them, projecting misunderstandings, and revealing the fragility of the way we relate to others and to the world. Virginia’s uncompromising gaze penetrates those corners of the self we adults agree to hide. That’s why, when the surprising outcome quickly arrives, we all understand that it was the only possible ending.

"Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing." Colm Tóibín

"Lispector’s second novel is a breathless, dizzying and multi­sensory dive into the mind…The first English translation of The Chandelier is a major event, offering the anglophone world an insight into Lispector’s early grappling with the shapes and rhythms of thought." The Times Literary Supplement 

"It’s a shaggy stop-motion masterpiece, plotless and argument-less and obsessed with the nature of thought….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  

"Lyrical, sensual, philosophical… gorgeous, unsettling prose…" The Nation  

"A vulnerable and moving performance—with a heart-stopping payoff… An undeniable quantity of genius." Parul Sehgal, The New York Times  

"The Chandelier is not a book to be read at a fast pace, but rather one to be slowly sipped and savored, a few pages at a time—one that forces us to find other modes of reading, of approaching literature, committed to finding the pleasures of the text." Christina Soto van der Plas, Los Angeles Review of Books  

"The Chandelier is an extraordinary book." Reinaldo Laddaga, 4Columns  

"The Chandelier will reward those who enjoy challenging works about the power of the mind and about how we might grow up—without destroying who we have been, without fearing who we might come to be." Nick Oxford, Music & Literature  

"This is a haunting family fable, and will fascinate those seeking a glimpse at Lispector’s genius in development." Publishers Weekly  

"Lispector’s signature brilliance lies in the minutely observed gradations of her characters’ feelings and of their elusive, half-formed thoughts." Kirkus (starred)  

"Better than Borges." Elizabeth Bishop

http://americasquarterly.org/content/book-review-chandelier

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." Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states.

Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories, 85 in all, are an epiphany, among the important books of this (2015)―or any―year

From teenagers coming into awareness of their sexual and artistic powers to humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies to old people who don’t know what to do with themselves. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives―and ours.

From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed. 

This compendium of tales by the great Brazilian weaves a spell so narcotic it lends credence to the belief that the author, long dead, still speaks.—The Boston Globe

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

Lispector is one of the hidden geniuses of twentieth century literature, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges and Pessoa…utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing. —Colm Tóibín

Clarice Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of the century. —New York Times Book Review

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

Mystic intelligence and charm, perfectly unhinged sensibility.—James Yeh, Vice

Thirty-eight years after the Brazilian author’s death, Katrina Dodson translates her work, which flips a writer’s maxim in making the mundane philosophical.—Time

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

The Complete Stories is a dangerous book to read quickly or casually because it’s so consistently delirious. Sentence by sentence, page by page, Lispector is exhilaratingly, arrestingly strange. —Terrence Rafferty, New York Times Sunday Book Review

Through these 85 stories, these mini invasions, it’s apparent that yes, Clarice Lispector was indeed a singular artist. Decades after her death, she continues to champion the possibilities of language, and its ability to mesmerize. —Juan Vidal, NPR

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 Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new.—Valeria Luiselli, Publishers Weekly (starred 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 

Complete Stories is an enchanting compilation marked by Lispector’s sharp and stylistically playful use of language.—Art in America

Reading Lispector is deceptively easy because of the pleasurable momentum, range, and freshness of her storylines. —Women’s Review of Books

A gorgeous, exhausting, sui generis collection.—Dustin Illingworth, 3:AM

"Well, so she left the beauty salon by the elevator in the Copacabana Palace Hotel. Her driver wasn’t there. She looked at her watch: it was four in the afternoon. And suddenly she remembered: she’d told “her” José to pick her up at five, not factoring in that she wouldn’t get a manicure or pedicure, just a massage. What should she do? Take a taxi? But she had a five-hundred-cruzeiro bill on her and the cab driver wouldn’t have change. She’d brought cash because her husband had told her you should never go out without cash. It crossed her mind to go back to the beauty salon and ask for change. But–but it was a May afternoon and the cool air was a flower blooming with its perfume. And so she thought it wonderful and unusual to be standing on the street–out in the wind that was ruffling her hair. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been alone with herself. Maybe never. It was always her–with others, and in these others she was reflected and the others were reflected in her. Nothing was–was pure, she thought without understanding what she meant. When she saw herself in the mirror —her skin, tawny from sunbathing, made the gold flowers in her black hair stand out against her face–, she held back from exclaiming “ah!”–for she was fifty million units of beautiful people. Never had there been–in all the world’s history–anyone like her. And then, in three trillion trillion years–there wouldn’t be a single girl exactly like her."

The Via Crucis of the Body includes 14 stories: Explanation, Miss Algrave, The Body, Via Crucis, The Man Who Showed Up, He Drank Me Up, For the Time Being, Day After Day, The Sound of Footsteps, Before the Rio-Niterói Bridge, Praça Maulá, Pig Latin, Better Than to Burn and But It's Going to Rain.

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.

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.

Includes the stories: In Search of a Dignity, The Departure of the Train, Dry Sketch of Horses, Where Were You at Night, Report on the Thing, Manifesto of the City, The Conjurings of Dona Fronzina, That's Where I'm Going, The Dead Man in The Sea at Urca, Silence, A Full Afternoon, Such Gentleness, Soul Storm and Natural Life.

Includes the stories Covert Joy, A Sincere Friendship, Evolution of a Myopia, Remnants of Carnival, Journey to Petrópolis, Eat Up, My Son, Forgiving God, Temptation, The Egg and the Chicken, One Hundred Years of Forgiveness, The Foreign Legion, The Obedient Ones, The Sharing of Loaves, A Hope, Monkeys, The Disasters of Sofia, The Servant, The Message, Boy in Pen and Ink, A Tale of So Much Love, The Waters of the World, The Fifth Story, Involuntary Incarnation, Two Stories My Way and The First Kiss.

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.

Here are collected thirteen of the Brazilian writer’s most brilliantly conceived stories, where mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Includes: Daydream and Drunkeness of a Young Lady, Love, A Chicken, The Imitation of the Rose, Happy Birthday, The Smallest Woman in the World, The Dinner, Preciousness, Family Ties, Beginnings of a Fortune, Mystery in Sao Cristóvao, The Crime of the Mathematics Teacher and The Buffalo.

Incluye en un solo volumen las crónicas reunidas anteriormente en Correio femenino y Só para mulheres.

Ver Book trailer. Correio para mulheres

After the impressive success of Todos os Contos, this definitive edition contains all of this legendary Brazilian author’s chronicles, with over 120 unpublished texts. 

Since Joachim Machado de Assis, Brazil has upheld a rich tradition of great chroniclers. In this constellation, Clarice’s star burns especially bright.

Clarice Lispector's stories for the Jornal do Brasil were written “with a flying pen” between 1967 and 1973. This volume, which includes texts published in other newspapers and magazines, finally gives us a panoramic view. The Lispector we find here is the housewife facing domestic problems: the family budget, the soup tureen that needs to be returned, the chronic silence of the telephone, raising children. But she is also the Lispector who speaks to us of love, the revolt against resignation, the self, the passage of time, and death. In short, the Lispector capable of transforming everyday life into pure metaphysics.

"If she played with the superficial truth, it was in service, she believed, of exposing one deeper, of passing readers a brief-lit lantern for the moonless dark of ourselves, even if that light revealed, sometimes, more contradiction, more chaos, more flittering soul-storm. Her crônicas blurred lines between genre—some are like little Zen koans, some lyrical reminiscences, while others, like “Return to Nature,” are harder to categorize, reading like parables or flash fiction. At times, they also muddied demarcations between nonfiction and fiction, resurrecting the oldest question of form: Where does nonfiction truly end and fiction begin, and what do we do with texts where we do not know the answer?"—The Paris Review

“Ce livre de Clarice Lispector est une mine d’or” —Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret

“Chacun de ses textes est comme un petit bijou ciselé” —Kerenn Elkaim, Livres Hebdo

“Il me suffit de lire au hasard trois lignes de Clarice Lispector pour remercier le ciel.” —Patrick Corneau

“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

"An excellent collection for readers who enjoy commentaries and observations from a wise, entertaining, realistic writer. Good choice for readers who enjoy essays by Anne Lamott and Ann Patchett.” —Library Journal, starred review 

"Reading Lispector — who, in the words of one of her translators, “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf” — is unlike reading anyone else. […] Too Much of Life evidence a perspicacious and playful mind keen to share in the magic and mystery of living." —Franklin Nelson, FT

"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." —Observer

“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 best new books

"A kind of literary LSD," —Miranda France at TLS on Twitter

Organised by the researcher Aparecida Maria Nunes, this book is a sample of Clarice Lispector’s intense journalistic activity. The reader will enjoy the privilege of coming into contact with unpublished texts, such as the first interview she conducted in 1940 with Catholic poet Tasso da Silveira, and the last in 1977, with artist Flora Morgan Snell. In both cases, Clarice’s original interviewing style is present, in which she flees from gender rules and is not afraid to participate in the conversation.

El amor y la amistad han inspirado docenas de veces a Clarice Lispector. Prueba de ello son las cuatro docenas de textos seleccionados por el historiador y editor Pedro Karp Vasquez para este volumen, el primero de una serie que tiene como objetivo presentar la autora al público joven.

For Clarice Lispector, writing and life were two sides of the same miracle: everyday life. In these reflections on writing and the act of writing, we find the keys to understanding the deep motivations behind her work.

The continuation of Correo femenino (Ladies’ Mail), this book contains 290 stories, mostly published between 1959 and 1961, when Clarice returns to Rio de Janeiro newly divorced and begins to work writing for the press. Under the pseudonyms Tereza Quadros and Helen Palmer, or behind the name of famous Brazilian actress Ilka Soares, she addresses issues relating to beauty, love, motherhood and domestic life.

Clarice Lispector began writing for the press in 1940, three years before publishing her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, and continued to write for newspapers and magazines on and off until two months before her death in 1977. Together in a book for the first time, the texts from her early days address a wide range of subjects, from childrearing to beauty treatments, from remedies against mice to the search for happiness, from choosing a perfume to moral dilemmas. She spoke of everything, from trivial to transcendental subjects, with disconcerting ease.

"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. 

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. 

A book of true stories, small reflections, memories and sensations, although these works of prose are as deeply fictional as her great novels. Some are true poetry, such as El secreto (The Secret), while others are embryonic novels, such as La sensible (The Sensitive One). Even when they are true stories or interpretations of an actual event, such as Brasilia or the splendid Mineirinho, that reality is transfigured because Clarice Lispector always takes us beyond reality and beyond the limits of words. With her, we go straight to the pure core of the neutral-alive.

De Natura Florum se publicó el 3 de abril de 1971 en el periódico Jornal do Brasil, de Río de Janeiro, y en 1984 integró el volumen A Descoberta do Mundo. El texto, a la manera de un herbario en prosa, se estructura a partir de veinticuatro entradas; las primeras cinco son definiciones botánicas generales, las restantes diecinueve son descripciones de flores, con una poética particular. En 2020 se celebró el centenario del nacimiento de Clarice Lispector. Con motivo de esta efeméride, Elena Odriozola, premio Nacional de Ilustración, y Alejandro G. Schnetzer  prepararon este libro imprescindible.

The five works included here represent the entire production of Clarice Lispector for children and young people: Almost True, Laura’s Intimate Life, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, The Woman Who Killed the Fish and How the stars were born. They are stories full of magic and humor and, in many cases, based on the life experiences of Clarice Lispector herself, she who owns the rare ability to transform banal everyday incidents into universal, timeless and unforgettable stories.

With illustrations by the renowned artist Mariana Valente, the author's granddaughter.

Twelve legends from the Brazilian jungle collected by Clarice Lispector from her country’s oral tradition. Each legend contains mysteries and surprises: girls and boys who turn into stars, the bird that brings luck, a toad that dances in the sky, Yara who lives at the bottom of the waters, the naughty Curupira, and the Jabutí tortoise whose wit is greater than his slowness.

“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 Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit” features caveats directed at the adults reading these stories aloud. 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." Publisher's Weekly

“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?”

"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." Publisher's Weekly 

All the Letters brings together the correspondence written by Clarice Lispector throughout her life. This selection of letters, of which about half are unknown to the public, provides a basic resource for understanding the author's literary career.

The unpublished correspondence addressed to writing friends such as Rubem Braga, Otto Lara Resende, Paulo Mendes Campos and Nélida Piñon, among others, stands out in All the Letters. The correspondence has been organized by decades – from 1940 to 1970 – and is accompanied by notes by the biographer Teresa Montero, which place the material in context in terms of time and place and include numerous personal and cultural references.

With a great deal of unpublished material, this book is the result of detailed research carried out by the journalist Larissa Vaz, aided by biographers and family, with the goal of providing a comprehensive vision of the person and the writer. The publication of the author's correspondence constitutes an important literary milestone, because Lispector displays her usual inspiration, lyricism and humour, making it into a chronicle that is as fascinating and creative as her own books – if not more so.

Clarice Lispector lived almost two decades abroad and maintained a long correspondence with family and friends ties and also about the publication of her books. Despite claiming that “she did not know how to write letters”, her letters are as interesting as her novels, short stories and chronicles. 

This collection contains Clarice Lispector’s private letters to her sisters, Tania and Elisa, written between 1940 and 1957, from her time in Rio de Janeiro as a journalist until her years in Washington, the last diplomatic posting she shared with her husband, Maury Gurgel Valente. These 120 letters were produced during a period of prolific literary production, during which the Brazilian author honed the basis of her highly personal style. Some are written “with a flying pen”, while others are more reflective. Sent from locations ranging from war-torn Naples to 1950s America, these letters are the necessary, sometimes essential, key to understanding the author’s literary career, upon which they shed new light.

 “Las palabras nada tienen que ver con las sensaciones. Las palabras son piedras duras y las sensaciones son delicadísimas, fugaces, exstremas". Clarice Lispector.

Una visión general de la autora a través de citas extraídas de todos sus libros y compiladas en un único volumen.

This fourth book in the Chronicles for Young People collection, edited by Pedro Karp Vasquez, contains some of the author’s most moving stories.

When she finally returned to Brazil, Clarice Lispector didn’t hesitate to choose Rio de Janeiro as the place where she’d live and raise her children. As a storyteller, she always sought her themes on the city streets and in conversations with people who knew the most about the city. In this book, the author takes young readers on a thrilling tour through the Marvellous City.

Clarice Lispector wrote nine novels. This book brings together not only fragments from those works, but also the stories that reveal her search, what the author herself defined as "what’s behind thought". Before each text, José Castello, editor of the collection, provides a summary of the novel in question and what Clarice was experiencing in her life when she wrote it.

Twenty texts chosen by authors influenced by Clarice Lispector’s works. The book presents a selection of stories published between 1962 and 1973 in the magazine Senhor and in the Jornal do Brasil, and later grouped in the books Selected Crônicas and Not to Forget. They cover wide-ranging themes such as childhood memories, life, death, love, writing, silence, motherhood and indignation. These texts have a special flavour because they were chosen by Clarice’s friends and admirers, who share the impact of the author and her works on their lives.

A selection of stories presented by twenty-two people relevant to Brazil’s cultural scene, including writers Luis Fernando Verissimo and Rubem Fonseca, critic José Castello, singer Maria Bethânia, actresses Fernanda Torres and Malu Mader, and film director Luiz Fernando Carvalho.

This book contains some essential keys to understanding Clarice Lispector’s work. To follow the rare interview she granted to Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna and Marina Colasanti in 1976, a year before her death, is to catch a glimpse of the mystery she wanted to be and capture in language beyond words. But as we read the other chapters in this volume, her first stories, her disturbing play The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels, her first journalistic articles, and her lecture on contemporary Brazilian literature, we gain a better, deeper understanding of her major works. Like a puzzle that’s incomplete without all of its pieces, Clarice’s literature is illuminated and completed in these writings.

 Coincidiendo con el 35 aniversario de la muerte de la autora, se publicó este libro con comentarios del crítico portugués Carlos Mendes de Souza sobre el trabajo pictórico de Lispector, así como su relación con las pinturas que adquirió a lo largo de su vida.

El libro registra los momentos más significativos de la vida y la obra de la escritora brasileña. El trabajo de Nádia Battella Gotlib ofrece una impresionante colección  de imágenes dde los lugares en que vivió y desarrolló su labor la autora.

Selección de las crónicas de Clarice Lispector publicadas en el Jornal do Brasil entre septiembre de 1967 y diciembre de 1973. Clarice es el ama de casa que se enfrenta a los problemas domésticos: el presupuesto familiar, la sopera que hay que devolver, la mudez crónica del teléfono, la delicada relación señora-criada o la educación de los hijos. No intenta ser «literaria» o interesante en estos textos que escribe, como ella misma afirma, «a vuela máquina» para el periódico.