The Complete Stories

Another must-read is Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s collection of more than 80 stories, written over her lifetime and reflective of a staggering genius brought to full flower in a translation that refuses to gloss over antic word choices that startle (and often amuse), structure that unravels in exciting ways, particularly in the later tales. Characters, mostly women, hang in limbo, passive and pathetic; take charge, whether bravely or bizarrely; are victims, perpetrators, witnesses of the mundane, the insane and the inane in a world that grows increasingly Kafkaesque. Women rage—overtly or internally—whether at beggars, their families, or a birthday cake. They assess their lives, sometimes coolly amused, as often bemused, face their impending deaths with fear or rage or aplomb in a universe spangled with the improbable, the cruel, the mordantly funny. Lispector, who died of cancer in 1977, muses on everything from a chicken’s egg to love to death, sometimes briskly, sometimes at length, always treading in new territory. This publication brings to the forefront a writer whom Colm Tóibín called “One of the hidden geniuses of the Twentieth Century.” – Betsy Burton