Covert Joy: Selected Stories

This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,”“Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story: Joy would always be covert for me… Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy.I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover

About the Author :
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). Katrina Dodson’s translation of The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector was awarded the PEN Translation Prize, the American Translators Association Lewis Galantière Award, and a Northern California Book Award. She translated Mário de Andrade’s 1928 Brazilian modernist classic, Macunaíma: The Hero with No Character. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, Triple Canopy and elsewhere. Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is an affiliated scholar of the Brazil LAB at Princeton University. A San Francisco native, she now lives in Brooklyn and teaches translation at Columbia University. Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, Telex from Cuba, The Mars Room, and, most recently, Creation Lake.

Review :
"The Complete Stories is bound to become a kind of bedside Bible or I Ching for readers of Lispector, both old and new." "Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century, with the real landmark, to my mind, her glittering and savage Complete Stories." "Terrifically funny: Language, for her, was the self’s right." "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." "One of the great literary discoveries of the past decade, for the English-speaking world, is the work of Clarice Lispector."