Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk). General editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector’s complete works at New Directions, BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: The Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, will be published in October. Paulo Gurgel Valente was born in Washington, DC, in 1953, while his father was stationed in the Brazilian embassy. He has published books on economics and finance. Colm Tóibín is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman professor of the humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.
"Every page vibrates with feeling. It’s not enough to say that
Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of
modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich."
*Lily Meyer - NPR*
"Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic
Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the
twenty-first century."
*Parul Sehgal - The New York Times*
"This new translation of The Hour of the Star reveals the
mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist’s Rio-set tale of a
young naïf, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator,
challenges the reader’s notions of identity, storytelling, and
love."
*Meghan O’Grady - Vogue*
"Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content
dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other. Lispector, on
the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though
her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake
narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered
and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and
excited readers."
*Colm Tóibín*
"I’m really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector.
I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing
happens—she describes the air. I think she’s such a great, great
novelist."
*John Waters*
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