Clarice Lispector
Story Stream
Clarice Lispector’s Cosmology July 29, 2024
Like dangerous talismans, Clarice Lispector’s novels stage unholy communions—between human and cockroach, reason and madness—that plunge readers further and further into “the incommunicable kingdoms of spirit.” Born in Ukraine, but forced to flee wit...
The Other Side of Silence April 26, 2024
In the first half of the twentieth century, literature, like philosophy, experienced a breakdown in its trust of language. This signaled, among other things, a breakdown in the relationship between the word and the world—in the power of language to s...
On Clarice Lispector’s 'The Apple in the Dark' March 22, 2024
Clarice Lispector called Washington a “vague and inorganic city.” Perhaps the contrived glory of America’s capital—with its clean, alphabet labeled streets, towering, marble-white obelisk, and mismatched neoclassical and modern government buildings—j...
Sebald and His Precursors March 01, 2024
Lerner, Cusk, Greenwell, Hemon, Cole, Dyer, Self, Sinclair, Craig, Hamburger . . . The list of Anglophone writers who bear a real or critically imposed debt to the German W. G. Sebald feels endless and has been repeated to the point of tedium. This a...
Rereading Clarice Lispector September 22, 2023
In the fall of 1973, Clarice Lispector was working on her Sunday crônica (column) for Jornal do Brasil, one of Rio de Janeiro’s leading newspapers. “For as long as I’ve known myself,” she wrote, “social issues have been more important to me than anyt...
A Lost Interview with Clarice Lispector February 14, 2023
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 spoke, my friend warned me, I ought not to mention the...
A Ritual for Mystery November 02, 2022
“Everything affects me—I see too much, hear too much, everything demands too much of me,” Clarice Lispector once wrote. Appropriately, the newly assembled collection of Lispector’s crônicas, a weekly column she wrote for the daily newspaper Jornal d...
Clarice Lispector's Magical Prose August 26, 2015
The Unusual Mind of Clarice Lispector August 03, 2015
