Books by Clarice Lispector

The Besieged City

by Clarice Lispector

Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel―the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals―is in English at last
Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novel―the story of a girl and the city her gaze reveals―is in English at last. Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitors―soldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateus―are attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceive―a viaduct―it takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficiality―her identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlor―that Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on “the mystery of the thing.” Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector’s own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century’s greatest writers―and an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.

The Besieged City

by Clarice Lispector

Now in paperback, The Besieged City―Clarice Lispector’s electrifying third novel―tells of a shallow girl becoming a desirable but highly materialistic woman in a rough-and-ready town
Rich with visions, miraculous horses, and linguistic ecstasy, The Besieged City stars Lucrécia. Clarice Lispector’s heroine is a materialistic girl free of the burden of thought: “Behold, behold, all of her, terribly physical, one of the objects.”

“The object―the thing,” Lispector once remarked, “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.”

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

by Clarice Lispector

Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”
Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.
Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

by Clarice Lispector

A love story by the great Clarice Lispector that asks: Just how might two people be joined? Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.”
Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller.
Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

The Woman Who Killed the Fish (Storybook ND Series)

by Clarice Lispector

Four beguiling tales for children of all ages.
A surprising new facet of Clarice Lispector’s genius “That woman who killed the fish unfortunately is me,” begins the title story, but “if it were my fault, I’d own up to you, since I don’t lie to boys and girls. I only lie sometimes to a certain type of grownup because there’s no other way.” Enumerating all the animals she’s loved―cats, dogs, lizards, chickens, monkeys―Clarice finally asks: “Do you forgive me?”

“The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit” is a detective story which explains that bunnies think with their noses: for a single idea a bunny might “scrunch up his nose fifteen thousand times” (he may not be too bright, but “he’s not foolish at all when it comes to making babies”). The third tale, “Almost True,” is a shaggy dog yarn narrated by a pooch who is very worried about a wicked witch: “I am a dog named Ulisses and my owner is Clarice.” The wonderful last story, “Laura’s Intimate Life” stars “the nicest hen I’ve ever seen.” Laura is “quite dumb,” but she has her “little thoughts and feelings. Not a lot, but she’s definitely got them. Just knowing she’s not completely dumb makes her feel all chatty and giddy. She thinks that she thinks.” A one-eyed visitor from Jupiter arrives and vows Laura will never be eaten: she’s been worrying, because “humans are a weird sort of person” who can love hens and eat them, too. Such throwaway wisdom abounds: “Don’t even get me started.” These delightful, high-hearted stories, written for her own boys, have charm to burn―and are a treat for every Lispector reader.

The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition

by Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector’s best-selling masterpiece―“her finest book” (The Nation)―now in a special hardcover edition to celebrate the centenary of her birth, with an illuminating new afterword by her son The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector’s consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life’s unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn’t seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator―edge of despair to edge of despair―and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader’s preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Covert Joy: Selected Stories

by Clarice Lispector

From the massive treasure house of her hugely successful Complete Stories, gathered here are the most glittering gems of Clarice Lispector’s short fiction
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

The Passion According to G.H. (New Directions Books)

by Clarice Lispector

Lispector’s most shocking novel.
The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door ―crushing the cockroach ―and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature…
Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”

Near to the Wild Heart (Ndp; 1225)

by Clarice Lispector

This new translation of Clarice Lispector's sensational first book tells the story of a middle class woman's life from childhood through an unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence.
Near to the Wild Heart, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, introduced Brazil to what one writer called “Hurricane Clarice”: a twenty-three-year-old girl who wrote her first book in a tiny rented room and then baptized it with a title taken from Joyce: “He was alone, unheeded, near to the wild heart of life.”
The book was an unprecedented sensation ― the discovery of a genius. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue frame the life of Joana, from her middle-class childhood through her unhappy marriage and its dissolution to transcendence, when she proclaims: “I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt.”

The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector, David Malouf, Mary Butts

From the internationally acclaimed Australian writer: a single volume gathering a brilliant new collection of his short fiction, Every Move You Make, and all of his previously published stories.

In the heretofore unpublished Every Move You Make: bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy--here are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent, from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons in Far North Queensland to bohemian Sydney to Ayres Rock in the Great Victoria Desert. These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.

Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf’s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child’s Play. It is a major literary event.

The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector, David Malouf, Mary Butts

Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories, 85 in all, are an epiphany, among the important books of this―or any―year
The recent publication by New Directions of five Lispector novels revealed to legions of new readers her darkness and dazzle. 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. Clarice’s stories take us through their lives―and ours.
From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed.

The Complete Stories

by Clarice Lispector, David Malouf, Mary Butts

For the first time in a single volume, all three of Mary Butts's (1890-1937) story collections have been gathered, and seven uncollected stories have been added (including two pieces never before published). Preface by John Ashbery. Foreword by Bruce R. McPherson.

The Hour of the Star

by Clarice Lispector

A new edition of Clarice Lispector’s final masterpiece, now with a vivid introduction by Colm Tóibín. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator―edge of despair to edge of despair―and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

A Breath of Life (New Directions Paperbook)

by Clarice Lispector

A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness.
A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published.
At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.

Água Viva (New Directions Books)

by Clarice Lispector

Lispector at her most philosophically radical. A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically profound as Clarice Lispector’s, Água Viva stands out as a particular triumph.

The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector

Now, for the first time in English we have Clarice Lispector’s second novel―a radical part of what made her a Brazilian legend Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier with The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. “It stands out,” her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, “in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book.” Of glacial intensity, consisting almost entirely of interior monologues―interrupted by odd and jarring fragments of dialogue and action―the novel moves in slow waves that crest in moments of revelation. As Virginia seeks freedom via creation, the drama of her isolated life is almost entirely internal: from childhood, she sculpts clay figurines with “the best clay one could desire: white, supple, sticky, cold. She got a clear and tender material from which she could shape a world. How, how to explain the miracle ...” While on one level simply the story of a woman’s life, The Chandelier’s real drama lies in Lispector’s attempt “to find the nucleus made of a single instant ... the tenuous triumph and the defeat, perhaps nothing more than breathing.” The Chandelier pushes Lispector’s lifelong quest for that nucleus into deeper territories than any of her other amazing works.

The Chandelier

by Clarice Lispector

In paperback, Clarice Lispector’s explosive and surprising second novel The Chandelier, written when Lispector was only twenty-three, reveals a very different author from the college student whose debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart, announced the landfall of “Hurricane Clarice.”
Virginia and her cruel, beautiful brother, Daniel, grow up in a decaying country mansion. They leave for the city, but the change of locale leaves Virginia's internal life unperturbed. In intensely poetic language, Lispector conducts a stratigraphic excavation of Virginia's thoughts, revealing the drama of Clarice’s lifelong quest to discover “the nucleus made of a single instant”―and displaying a new face of this great writer, blazing with the vitality of youth.

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas

by Clarice Lispector

In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas―short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces―are the delicious canapés The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.
The crônica, a literary genre peculiar to Brazilian newspapers, allows writers (or even soccer stars) to address a wide readership on any theme they like. Chatty, mystical, intimate, flirtatious, and revelatory, Clarice Lispector’s pieces for the Saturday edition of Rio’s leading paper, the Jornal do Brasil, from 1967 to 1973, take the forms of memories, essays, aphorisms, and serialized stories. Endlessly delightful, her insights make one sit up and think, whether about children or social ills or pets or society women or the business of writing or love. This new, large, and beautifully translated volume, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas presents a new aspect of the great writer―at once off the cuff and spot on.

Complete Stories

by Kurt Vonnegut, Clarice Lispector

Here for the first time is the complete short fiction of one of the twentieth century's foremost imaginative geniuses. More than half of Vonnegut's output was short fiction, and never before has the world had occasion to wrestle with it all together. Organized thematically—"War," "Women," "Science," "Romance," "Work Ethic versus Fame and Fortune," "Behavior," "The Band Director" (those stories featuring Lincoln High's band director and nice guy George Hemholtz), and "Futuristic"—these ninety-eight stories were written from 1941 to 2007, and include those Vonnegut published in magazines and collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, Bagombo Snuff Box, and other books; here for the first time five previously unpublished stories; as well as a handful of others that were published online and read by few. During his lifetime Vonnegut published fewer than half of the stories he wrote, his agent telling him in 1958 upon the rejection of a particularly strong story, "Save it for the collection of your works which will be published someday when you become famous. Which may take a little time."

Selected and introduced by longtime Vonnegut friends and scholars Dan Wakefield and Jerome Klinkowitz, Complete Stories puts Vonnegut's great wit, humor, humanity, and artistry on full display. An extraordinary literary feast for new readers, Vonnegut fans, and scholars alike.

Complete Stories

by Kurt Vonnegut, Clarice Lispector

One of the most phenomenally acclaimed and successful books of recent years is now available as a paperback―with three just-discovered stories Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don’t know what to do with themselves― and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives―and hers―and ours.

The Apple in the Dark

by Clarice Lispector

“The best one,” as Clarice Lispector called The Apple in the Dark, her famously intense 1961 novel “It’s the best one,” Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: “I can’t define it, how it is, I can only say that it’s much better constructed than the previous ones.” A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fact highly sculpted, while being chiefly a metaphysical book, and in this stunning new translation, the novel’s mysteries and allegories glow with a fresh scintillating light.
Martim, fleeing from a murder he believes he committed, plunges into the dark nocturnal jungle: stumbling along, in a state of both fear and wonder, eventually he comes to a remote, quiet ranch and finds work with the two women who own it. The women are tranquil enough before his arrival, but are affected by his radical mystery. Soaked through with Martim’s inner night (his soul is in the darkness where everything is created), the novel vibrates with his perpetual searching state of vigil. Often he feels close to an epiphany: “for the first time he was present in the moment in which whatever is happening is happening.” Yet such flashes flicker out, so he’s ever on the watch for “life to take on the dimensions of a destiny.”
In an interview, Lispector once said: “I am Martim.” As she puts it in The Apple in the Dark: “All I’ve got is hunger. And that unstable way of grasping an apple in the dark―without letting it fall.”

Selected Cronicas

by Clarice Lispector

"Clarice Lispector was a born writer....she writes with sensuous verve, bringing her earliest passions into adult life intact, along with a child's undiminished capacity for wonder."―The New York Times Book Review "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 crônicas, 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

Hour of the Star (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Clarice Lispector

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.

Para Nao Esquecer (Em Portugues do Brasil)

by Clarice Lispector

Para no olvidar no es, aparentemente, un libro de cuentos ni una novela, sino –como indica su subtítulo– un libro de crónicas, de pequeñas reflexiones, recuerdos y sensaciones. Pero estas prosas son tan profundamente ficción, ficción clariceana, como sus grandes novelas. Algunas son verdadera poesía, como «El secreto», otras embriones de novela, como «La sensible». Pero incluso cuando son realmente crónicas, es decir interpretaciones de un suceso real, como «Brasilia» o la espléndida «Mineirinho», esa realidad se transfigura, porque Clarice Lispector nos lleva siempre más allá de la realidad y más allá de los límites de la palabra; con ella vamos directos al núcleo puro de lo «neutro-vivo».

A Via Crucis do Corpo (Em Portugues do Brasil)

by Clarice Lispector

Publicados pela primeira vez em 1974 os 13 contos que compõem "A Via Crucis do Corpo" de Clarice Lispector são precedidos por uma explicação da autora. Ela diz que as histórias foram feitas sob encomenda e que contrariando sua vontade inicial aceitou a tarefa por puro impulso. Tentou assiná-lo com o pseudônimo Cláudio Lemos mas acabou sucumbindo ao argumento de que deveria ter liberdade para escrever o que quisesse. E foi o que fez num único fim de semana. Mas registrou: "Se há indecências nas histórias a culpa não é minha". "A Via Crucis do Corpo" não tem nada de imoral; é antes de tudo uma fresta no cárcere social que mantém a mulher - condutora de todos os contos - supostamente distante de seus desejos e fantasias. Ou dos fardos como a virgindade. O que Clarice fez foi apenas descrever de forma leve e bem- humorada algumas dessas benditas transgressões. Mas como em toda a sua obra a autora abre espaço para falar dos sentimentos mais profundos e das sinceras idiossincrasias da alma. Em "O Homem que Apareceu" ela se depara com Cláudio Brito um grande poeta transformado em lixo humano e relativiza o fracasso: "Mas quem pode dizer com sinceridade que se realizou na vida? O sucesso é uma mentira".

Capa comum: 84 páginas
Editora: Rocco; Edição: 1ª (12 de dezembro de 1998)
Idioma: Português
ISBN-10: 8532509509
ISBN-13: 978-8532509505
Dimensões do produto: 20,6 x 13,4 x 0,2 cm
Peso de envio: 113 g

Felicidade Clandestina

by Clarice Lispector

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

Publicado pela primeira vez em 1971, Felicidade clandestina reúne 25 contos que falam de infância, adolescência e família, mas relatam, acima de tudo, as angústias da alma.

The Hour of the Star (New Directions Paperbook)

by Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Colas, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free/She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator―edge of despair to edge of despair―and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leave us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

A paixão segundo G.H: Romance (Portuguese Edition)

by Clarice Lispector

Text: Portugese

The Passion According to G.H. (Emergent Literatures)

by Clarice Lispector

A disoriented and confused young woman looks back on her life and her place in the world

The Foreign Legion (New Directions Paperbook)

by Clarice Lispector

"A radiant beauty of a writer."―The Los Angeles Times The Foreign Legion is a collection in two parts, gathering both stories and chronicles, and it offers wonderful evidence of Clarice Lispector's unique sensibility and range as an exponent of experimental prose. It opens with thirteen stories and the second part of the book presents her newspaper crônicas, which Lispector said she retrieved from a bottom drawer.

Soulstorm

by Clarice Lispector

The twenty-none stories in Soulstorm were originally published in two separate volumes in 1974―A Via Crucis do Corpo (The Stations of the Body) and Onde Estivestes de Noite (Where You Were at Night)―and are now combined and sensitively translated into English by Alexis Levitan. The realm of Lispector's fiction is the inner life; self-knowledge is her main concern. Like James Joyce's Dubliners, her protagonists live small, stifled lives, often unaware of their own suffering, but her lucid and richly textured narratives allow us, the readers, the epiphanies that they themselves are denied.

Almost True

by Clarice Lispector

Talking animals take center stage—and explain the mysteries of the world!—in this zany, Kipling-esque picture book from literary great Clarice Lispector for ages 5 to 9.

Have you ever wondered why birds have no teeth? Or why sometimes black clouds do not rain? Ulisses the talking dog has the answers!

“Once upon a time: me!” announces the narrator of this tall clever tale about a talking dog named Ulisses, his owner Clarice, a rooster named Evidio, a hen named Edissea, and a greedy fig tree. The narrator is none other than Ulisses the dog, and his story really gets started when a bad witch named Exelia floats into town disguised as a black cloud. The fig tree wants to get rich quick—and with the witch’s help, she hatches a dark plan to make Edissea and her fellow hens lay eggs all night long. But the plan backfires when the birds cluck and crow around the clock in protest, driving the fig tree to distraction.

In this madcap story by Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, animals are the master storytellers and the prime movers. As in a Rudyard Kipling Just So story, they help explain the mysteries of the world, such as why birds have no teeth. But dogs don’t know everything – for instance, how do you eat the fruit of the jabuticaba, the Brazilian grapetree? “You, kid, ask a grownup,” concludes Ulisses. Lispector's story is perfect for ages 5 to 9 years old.

The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit

by Clarice Lispector

A chatty rabbit dares you to solve how he keeps escaping his hutch in this whimsical detective story perfect for reading aloud with animal lovers ages 5 to 9.

When Joãozinho the rabbit scrunches his nose 15,000 times, he finally comes up with an escape plan!

Joãozinho is an ordinary rabbit, happy and hungry. Ideas come to rabbits when they scrunch and unscrunch their noses, but as anyone who has seen a rabbit knows, they do this nonstop. In order to sniff out one single idea, they have to scrunch their noses 15,000 times. Joãozinho comes up with an idea as good as the smell of a fresh carrot. He's finally figured out how to escape from his rabbit hutch in order to find more food. Joãozinho soon becomes an escape artist—but how does he do it? That's a mystery he dares you to solve.

Clarice Lispector, one of the foremost writers of the twentieth century, wrote this story for her son Paulo, a lover of rabbits when he was small and, as she writes in her introductory note, “had yet to discover stronger affections.”

The Burned Sinner and the Harmonious Angels

by Clarice Lispector

'One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century' - Colm T ibin

A 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.

The Imitation of the Rose

by Clarice Lispector

Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith

Thirteen short tales from one of the most blistering and innovative writers of the twentieth century.

The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

A Very Brazilian Christmas The Greatest Brazilian Holiday Stories of All Time

by Paulo Coelho, Clarice Lispector, Machado de Assis, Moacyr Scliar, Bruna Dantas Lobato, Victor Heringer, Mário de Andrade, Lygia Fagundes Telles

A literary celebration of Christmas south of the equator where the holiday falls during the Brazilian summer and festivities are punctuated by the rhythms of surf and samba. Including works by classic and contemporary authors, this bountiful, surprising anthology features a potent mix of familial feasts, poetry, the peal of church bells, Midnight Masses, and U.S. expatriates flirting at parties in Rio de Janeiro. With writings by Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, Clarice Lispector, Paulo Coelho, Graciliano Ramos, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Moacyr Scliar, Rubem Braga, Victor Heringer, Bruna Dantas Lobato, and more.