4.0
Complete Stories
ByPublisher Description
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.Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesComplete Stories Reviews
4.0
“oh it was a glorious month.
did i finish her? i don’t think i finished her, because to finish lispector would imply that thought can conclude, or consciousness can arrive at an end, when what she reveals is precisely the impossibility of closure, and so here i am, having read less than a hundred of her stories, suspended in a strange category i cannot name, no longer merely a reader yet not anything stable enough to claim understanding, only a being who has been made aware of its own interior fracture, her stories do not begin in the conventional sense but instead expose the illusion of beginnings themselves, as if every first line were already the continuation of an invisible prior, as though every sentence were already an entrance into being, and within that entrance i encounter again and again the same trembling constellations: the self that cannot hold itself together, identity dissolving in the face of awareness, the ordinary suddenly revealing something sacred and unbearable, language faltering before what it tries to grasp, the body becoming both intimate and strange, freedom appearing not as liberation but as a quiet terror, and loneliness as the condition of consciousness itself, which is why i find it almost naive when i see novels celebrated for their best opening lines, as though the beginning a performance, when in lispector it is ontological as if each sentence were compelled into existence by the mere fact of being, and in that sense every story is always already at its origin and its end at once, dissolving the linearity we depend on to feel secure, and so here i am left questioning what it means to have read this "complete stories," eighty six to be exact, like quantity could measure an encounter that is fundamentally qualitative, existential, because to read her is not to accumulate stories but to undergo them, to be displaced from the certainty of self into something more porous, where meaning trembles, to become human by enduring the world's opacity, by letting myself be changed by the moments i cannot explain.
so is this what i am now, just a reader of her work? or am i a consciousness that has been interrupted by it, one that can no longer fully believe in the simplicity of beginnings, endings, or even itself?
yeah, what a glorious month.”
“Collects the Brazilian writer’s nine collections plus previously unpublished works. The tales that worked best for me in this volume were the ones based on interactions between men and women. The abstract inner monologues were tough to grasp. Just OK.”
About Clarice Lispector
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).
Other books by Clarice Lispector
Katrina Dodson
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.
Other books by Katrina Dodson
Benjamin Moser
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.
Other books by Benjamin Moser
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