Kirjahaku

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

'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.

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 TóibínTranslated by Benjamin Moser and Magdalena Edwards

'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 ToblerEdited by Benjamin Moser with an Afterword by Sheila Heti

'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.

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.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm TóibínA housewife’s life is shattered by a sudden epiphany. A simple tale of killing cockroaches fragments into multiple narratives, each uncovering new truths. In this selection of haunting short stories, Lispector reveals the permeable boundaries between past and present, the real and the surreal, showing ordinary moments to contain the deepest existential truths.

Tells the stories of a fearful adolescent, an angry old woman, a dog's burial, a possessive mother and her son, a businessman's dinner, and a French explorer in Africa

Presents a collection of short stories including selections from "A vie crucis do corpo" and "Onde estivestes de noite?"

"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 cr nicas, 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 Besieged City's Lucr cia is unlike any of her heroines--mute and unreflective, she may have no inner life. And its plot resembles no other Lispector narrative: small town gal marries rich man, sees the world, and lives happily ever after. That said, there are miraculous horses, linguistic ecstasy, catty remarks, minor characters' visions, music from unknown sources. But centrally, there is Lucr cia, the heroine free of the burden of thought, who "leaned over without any individuality, trying merely to look at things directly." As Lispector's biographer Benjamin Moser writes in his introduction: "Lucr cia is vain and pretentious, content to remain on the surface. Lucr cia--there it is in her name--is lucre, just another one of the porcelain knickknacks in her mother's sitting room: 'Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.' Her ambitions are material, and she is the most insolently superficial woman Clarice ever portrayed." And yet, with this astonishing writer, a fascination with superficiality pulls the reader into very deep waters. As Lispector remarked: "The object--the thing--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."