Synopses & Reviews
The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. 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. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives — and ours.
From one of the greatest modern writers, these eighty-six stories, gathered from the nine collections published during Clarice LIspector’s lifetime, follow her from her teens to her deathbed.
Review
"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
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
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)
Review
"Clarice Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of the century." New York Times Book Review
Review
"The elusive genius who dramatized a fractured interior world in rich, synesthetic prose." Megan O'Grady, Vogue
Review
"Lispector reads with lively intelligence and is terrifically funny. Language, for her, was the self's light." Lorrie Moore
Review
"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
About the Author
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil's greatest modern writer.
Katrina Dodson's translation of the Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector was awarded the 2016 PEN Translation Prize, the Lewis Galantière Award, and a Northern California Book Award. She is currently translating the Brazilian modernist classic Macunaíma: the Hero Without a Character for New Directions and adapting her Lispector translation journal into a book. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.