Clarice Lispector was a woman plagued by “the hellish grandeur of life.” Throughout her career the Brazilian author and journalist showed a fascination for the mundane, as well as a desperation to ...

Lispector’s The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, illustrated by Kammal João, and Almost True, illustrated by Carla Irusta, will hit shelves on April 1. Both are translated from the Portuguese by ...

Colm Tóibín on how all the Brazillian author's talents and eccentricities come together in her most famous, final novella about a poor typist in Rio In January 1963, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert ...

Literary critic and theorist and Robert Scholes said, “What makes reality fascinating is the imaginary catastrophe that lies behind it.” This is the quote that comes to mind every time I read from ...

To understand the philosophical dimensions of her fiction you must read her 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark. Statue of Clarice Lispector at Leme Beach in Rio de Janeiro, 2016. Like dangerous ...

When Clarice Lispector was writing Near to the Wild Heart and a friend suggested she revise sections, she responded: "When I reread what I've written, I feel like I'm swallowing my own vomit." On ...

Plenty of writers inspire fierce devotion in their readers—­the David Foster Wallace acolytes, with their duct-taped copies of Infinite Jest, come to mind, as do the smug objectivists dressed in ...

In 2006, I received an e-mail from an old friend, a professor in São Paulo, who told me that a man who was “extremely neurotic (I might say ‘psychotic’)” was trying to get in touch with me. If we ...

In 1948, Clarice Lispector wrote a moving letter to her sister Tania, offering some pointed advice: "Have the courage to transform yourself," she wrote, "to do what you desire." It's a fairly simple ...

For a handful of people, Clarice Lispector’s “A Breath of Life” being published in English for the first time is very good news. Sadly, that handful is fairly small. Lispector, an extraordinarily ...