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20 must-read classics in translation

Clarice Lisepctor WTSW

Where to start reading Clarice Lispector

9 classics to celebrate women in translation

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The Apple in the Dark

Described by Clarice Lispector as 'the best one', this intoxicating portrayal of a man searching for his destiny is her mystical, enigmatic masterpiece 
 
'All I've got is hunger. And that instable way of grasping an apple in the dark-without letting it fall' 
 
Martim, believing that he has committed a murder, flees the city and escapes into the night. Wandering through the vastness of nature he arrives, in a state of fear and wonder, at a remote ranch run by two women. There Martim finds work and, as he labours in the blistering heat of the Brazilian summer, becomes transfigured; remade into something else entirely. 
 
Translated by Benjamin Moser 
 
'The most important Brazilian woman writer of the twentieth century... The richness of The Apple in the Dark defies the explanatory power of any single interpretation' TLS

Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century

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

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

One of the true originals of Latin American literature

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

Clarice Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920. In the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, her family fled to Brazil, where she arrived when she was a little more than a year old. She published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

In the mistaken belief that he has killed his wife, Martim flees the city and arrives, in a state of both fear and wonder, at a remote ranch. There, he will have to remake himself, emerging, from the beast-like state in which his crime has plunged him, to the fullness of a reinvented humanity. Along the way, he will mark the lives of the two women who run the ranch, brambly, authoritarian Vitória and her weepy cousin Ermelinda. But the real drama is interior: Clarice Lispector's most wrenching, and most intoxicating, exploration of how a man becomes a human - and of how language can transform a life into a destiny. 
 
A highly sculpted, metaphysical book whose mysteries and allegories glow with a scintillating light, Apple in the Dark is a masterpiece by &quot;one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century'&quot; (Colm Tóibín). 
 
Translated by Benjamin Moser.

Complete Chronicles

Too Much of Life

A TLS Book of the Year 
 
This exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life 
 
'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' 
 
Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels and short stories, in her Chronicles she turned her attention to the everyday, reshaping the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. 
 
Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. 
 
Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

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

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

This 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

The closest thing we have to an autobiography by Lispector and contain many rewarding reflections on her own work . . . thrillingly unpredictable . . . singular visitations from a brilliant entity

Lispector writes and thinks like nobody else, sending her readers off to look at the world through strange new lispectacles

An emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce

Plenty of writers inspire fierce devotion in their readers... but no one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans that she's known by a single name: "Clarice"

She writes with sensuous verve, bringing her earliest passions into adult life intact, along with a child's undiminished capacity for wonder

For those unfamiliar with her, this book opens a door into her uniquely challenging and rewarding body of work . . . 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

Her crônicas - short pieces of observational writing inflected by personal experience but aimed at illuminating something larger - came after her novels, and met with great acclaim... Reading Lispector is unlike reading anyone else...the texts collected in Too Much Life evidence a perspicacious and playful mind keen to share in the magic and mystery of living.

A golden apple has to go to the extraordinary Too Much of Life: Complete chronicles by Clarice Lispector ... a collection of newspaper columns, bursting with lapidary wisdom and hallucinatory, voluptuous imagery

Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts ... vast, playful and volcanic

Clarice Lispector (Author) 
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star. 
 
Margaret Jull Costa (Translator) 
Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, among them novelists: Javier Marías, José Saramago and Eça de Queiroz, and poets: Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Ana Luísa Amaral. Her work has brought her numerous prizes, most recently, the 2018 Premio Valle-Inclán for On the Edge by Rafael Chirbes. In 2014, she was awarded an OBE for services to literature. 
 
Robin Patterson (Translator) 
Robin Patterson has translated or co-translated a variety of works by Portuguese, Brazilian and Angolan authors, including Luandino Vieira's Our Musseque, José Luís Peixoto's In Galveias, Lúcio Cardoso's Chronicle of the Murdered House (which won the 2017 Best Translated Book Award), and The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis.

'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?' 
 
Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels, in her Chronicles she turns her attention to the everyday, turning the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations. 
 
Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing tales of the lost loves of a taxi driver, or the bitterness lurking beneath the prettiness of an old friend, become an exposition of the currents and foibles that define our lives. Everything from the meaning of cosmonauts to the new ideas, writers and artists that populate the sparkling international world of the sixties and seventies are considered and transformed into jewels of insight, delight and devastation. 
 
Sincere and playful, exhilarating and contemplative, Too Much of Life: Complete Chronicles opens up a new way of seeing the world.

The Imitation of the Rose

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith 
 
Thirteen short tales from one of the most blistering and innovative writers of the twentieth century. 
 
The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

'One of the very great writers of the last century' Guardian 
 
'Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before' Colm Tóibín 
 
'He'd wait for her, she knew that now. Until she learned' 
 
Lóri yearns for love yet is scared of herself, and of connecting with another human. When she meets Ulisses, a Professor of Philosophy, she is forced to confront her fears. As both of them will learn, to be worthy of another person, they must first be fully themselves. The book of which Clarice Lispector said, 'I humanized myself', An Apprenticeship is about the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, and what it means to love and be loved. 
 
Translated by Stefan Tobler 
Edited by Benjamin Moser with an Afterword by Sheila Heti

Her brilliant and bewildering style is helping me to imagine how to write again

One of the very great writers of the last century

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures teaches us how to love. And how love lies in spaces. In waiting

Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before

Clarice Lispector (Author) Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

A lonely woman in Rio de Janeiro makes a connection that will change her life. Ulisses, a mysterious man, has penetrated her soul and turned her inside out. 
 
This is a devastating novel of the interior, of a woman yearning to love, of the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, of the cosmic changes that enrich us and destroy us at the dawn of love.

The Chandelier

Clarice Lispector's masterly second novel, now available in English for the first time 
 
'She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world' 
 
Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia's progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector's landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman's inner life. 
 
'Utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing' Colm Tóibín 
 
Translated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

Prolific and peerless ... a Brazilian national treasure ... Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind ... through her texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place

Clarice Lispector (Author) Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short-story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart, in 1943, when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star. Benjamin Moser (Translator) Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. His work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence was recognized with Brazil's State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. His most recent book, Sontag: Her Life, won the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in Utrecht, in the central Netherlands.

'She found the best clay that one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold ... She would get a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world' 
 
Like the clay from which she sculpts figurines as a girl, Virginia is constantly shifting and changing. From her dreamlike childhood on Quiet Farm with her adored brother Daniel, through an adulthood where the past continues to pull her back and shape her, she moves through life, grasping for the truth of existence. Illuminating Virginia's progress through intense flashes of image, sensation and perception, The Chandelier, Lispector's landmark second novel, is a disorienting and exhilarating portrait of one woman's inner life.

The Besieged City

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' Colm Tóibín 
 
'She suddenly leaned toward the mirror and sought the love­liest way to see herself' 
 
Lucrécia Neves is vain, unreflective, insolently superficial, almost mute. She may have no inner life at all. As she morphs from small-town girl to worldly wife of a rich man, and her small home town surrenders to the forces of progress, Lucrécia seeks perfection: to be an object, serene, smooth, beyond the burden of words or even thought itself. A book that obsessed its author, The Besieged City is unlike any other work in Lispector's canon: a story of transformation, of what it means to see and to be seen.

Prolific and peerless ... a Brazilian national treasure ... Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind ... through her texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place

Written in flight from Lispector's '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. The plot itself is utterly unlike any other Lispector narrative: small-town girl marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after. 
 
 But there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasies, catty remarks, minor characters' visions and music from unknown sources. 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'. 
 
Translated by Johnny Lorenz

Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

'The morning became a long, drawn-out afternoon that became depthless night dawning innocently through the house' 
 
Tales of desire and madness from this giant of Brazilian literature. 
 
Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

Complete Stories

The publication of Clarice Lispector's Complete Stories, eighty-five in all, is a major literary event. Now, for the first time in English, are all the stories that made her a Brazilian legend: 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. Lispector's stories take us through their lives - and ours. From one of the greatest modern writers, these 85 stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow Clarice Lispector throughout her life.

One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century

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

Lispector's Complete Stories is a remarkable book, proof that she was - in the company of Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo and her 19th-century countryman Machado de Assis - one of the true originals of Latin American literature

Plenty of writers inspire fierce devotion in their readers... but no one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans that she's known by a single name: "Clarice"... You will not be disappointed if you read The Complete Stories. It might even become your bible

Translated beautifully and with a vigorous pulse by Katrina Dodson, The Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new. Wherever one opens the book, there is a slice of life to confront. In one of her later stories Lispector recalls the writer Sergio Porto, her friend, who was once asked by a stewardess on a plane if he wanted coffee. To which he replied: "I'll take everything I have a right to." We can approach this volume in a similar spirit: take everything

Near to the Wild Heart

Clarice Lispector's sensational, prize-winning debut novel Near to the Wild Heart was published when she was just twenty-three and earned her the name 'Hurricane Clarice'. It tells the story of Joana, from her wild, creative childhood, as the 'little egg' who writes poems for her father, through her marriage to the faithless Otávio and on to her decision to make her own way in the world. As Joana, endlessly mutable, moves through different emotional states, different inner lives and different truths, this impressionistic, dreamlike and fiercely intelligent novel asks if any of us ever really know who we are. 
 
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. In 1933, Clarice Lispector encountered Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, which convinced her that she was meant to write. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature. After living variously in Italy, the UK, Switzerland and the US, in 1959, Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

Brilliant ... Lispector should be on the shelf with Kafka and Joyce

The first fiery novel by the Brazilian national treasure

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

One of the twentieth century's most mysterious writers

The originality of Near to the Wild Heart lies in its technique and language: self conscious, bleakly humourous, but poetic ... We now finally have a translation worthy of Clarice Lispector's inimitable style. Go out and buy it.

The Passion According to G.H

One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Books by Women 
 
G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works. 
 
Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovation in fiction brought her international renown. References to her literary work pervade the music and literature of Brazil and Latin America. She was born in the Ukraine in 1920, but in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Civil War, the family fled to Romania and eventually sailed to Brazil. She published her first novel, Near to the Wildheart in 1943 when she was just twenty-three, and the next year was awarded the Graça Aranha Prize for the best first novel. Many felt she had given Brazillian literature a unique voice in the larger context of Portuguese literature. After living variously in Italy, the UK, Switzerland and the US, in 1959, Lispector with her children returned to Brazil where she wrote her most influential novels including The Passion According to G.H. She died in 1977, shortly after the publication of her final novel, The Hour of the Star.

The premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century

G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black, dusty, prehistoric - crawling out of the wardrobe and, panicking, slams the door on it. Her irresistible fascination with the dying insect provokes a spiritual crisis, in which she questions her place in the universe and her very identity, propelling her towards an act of shocking transgression. Clarice Lispector's spare, deeply disturbing yet luminous novel transforms language into something otherworldly, and is one of her most unsettling and compelling works.

Agua Viva

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

A bewitching, jewel-like book unlike anything in modern literature. Agua Viva baffles and inspires me ... Each word of the book lands with the sweet force of a blade ... crystalline

Lispector stands at the pinnacle of Brazil's impressive literary achievement

A Breath of Life

A Breath of Life is Clarice Lispector's final novel, 'written in agony', which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into: the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he has created Angela, so, eventually, he must let her die, for life is merely 'a kind of madness that death makes.' This is a unique, elegiac meditation on the creation of life, and of art.

A text that resonates endlessly ... her images dazzle

Hour of the Star

Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola and her philandering rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly and unloved. Yet telling her story is the narrator Rodrigo S.M., who tries to direct Macabéa's fate but comes to realize that, for all her outward misery, she is inwardly free. Slyly subverting ideas of poverty, identity, love and the art of writing itself, Clarice Lispector's audacious last novel is a haunting portrayal of innocence in a bad world.