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.

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...

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

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 a 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.

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.

Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macab a, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macab a 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, Macab a 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Talking animals take center stage--and explain the mysteries of the world!--in this zany, Kipling-esque picture book from literary great Clarice Lispector for ages 5 to 9.

Have you ever wondered why birds have no teeth? Or why sometimes black clouds do not rain? Ulisses the talking dog has the answers!

Once upon a time: me! announces the narrator of this tall clever tale about a talking dog named Ulisses, his owner Clarice, a rooster named Evidio, a hen named Edissea, and a greedy fig tree. The narrator is none other than Ulisses the dog, and his story really gets started when a bad witch named Exelia floats into town disguised as a black cloud. The fig tree wants to get rich quick--and with the witch's help, she hatches a dark plan to make Edissea and her fellow hens lay eggs all night long. But the plan backfires when the birds cluck and crow around the clock in protest, driving the fig tree to distraction.

In this madcap story by Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, animals are the master storytellers and the prime movers. As in a Rudyard Kipling Just So story, they help explain the mysteries of the world, such as why birds have no teeth. But dogs don't know everything - for instance, how do you eat the fruit of the jabuticaba, the Brazilian grapetree? You, kid, ask a grownup, concludes Ulisses. Lispector's story is perfect for ages 5 to 9 years old.

A chatty rabbit dares you to solve how he keeps escaping his hutch in this whimsical detective story perfect for reading aloud with animal lovers ages 5 to 9.

When Joãozinho the rabbit scrunches his nose 15,000 times, he finally comes up with an escape plan!

Joãozinho is an ordinary rabbit, happy and hungry. Ideas come to rabbits when they scrunch and unscrunch their noses, but as anyone who has seen a rabbit knows, they do this nonstop. In order to sniff out one single idea, they have to scrunch their noses 15,000 times. Joãozinho comes up with an idea as good as the smell of a fresh carrot. He's finally figured out how to escape from his rabbit hutch in order to find more food. Joãozinho soon becomes an escape artist--but how does he do it? That's a mystery he dares you to solve.

Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, wrote this story for her son Paulo, a lover of rabbits when he was small and, as she writes in her introductory note, had yet to discover stronger affections.

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.
Virginia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virginia's internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virginia'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.

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.

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. This beautifully translated collection of selected columns, or crônicas, is just as immediately stimulating today and ably reinforces her reputation as one of Brazil's greatest writers. 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.--Publishers Weekly

The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year.The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The giddying sense of compassion that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them.

Giovanni Pontiero's translation has been lauded by Gregory Rabassa as magnificent.

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 Sao 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, Sao 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.

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. It opens with thirteen stories and the second part of the book presents her newspaper crônicas, which Lispector said she retrieved from a bottom drawer.