Tác Giả Clarice Lispector

A Breath Of Life

A sensational and mystical novel from one of the 20th century's greatest modernist writers

A Breath of Life is Clarice Lispector's final novel, 'written in agony', which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into: the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he has created Angela, so, eventually, he must let her die, for life is merely 'a kind of madness that death makes.' This is a unique, elegiac meditation on the creation of life, and of art.

Hour Of The Star

Clarice Lispector's audacious and haunting last novel, new to Penguin Modern Classics

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.

An Apprenticeship Or The Book Of Pleasures

Guardian'One of the very great writers of the last century'

'He'd wait for her, she knew that now. Until she learned'

Lóri yearns for love yet is scared of herself, and of connecting with another human. When she meets Ulisses, a Professor of Philosophy, she is forced to confront her fears. As both of them will learn, to be worthy of another person, they must first be fully themselves. The book of which Clarice Lispector said, 'I humanized myself', An Apprenticeship is about the ultimate unknowability of the other in a relationship, and what it means to love and be loved.

Translated by Stefan Tobler

Edited by Benjamin Moser with an Afterword by Sheila Heti

'Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before' Colm Tóibín

The Apple In The Dark

Described by Clarice Lispector as 'the best one', this intoxicating portrayal of a man searching for his destiny is her mystical, enigmatic masterpiece

'All I've got is hunger. And that instable way of grasping an apple in the dark-without letting it fall'

Martim, believing that he has committed a murder, flees the city and escapes into the night. Wandering through the vastness of nature he arrives, in a state of fear and wonder, at a remote ranch run by two women. There Martim finds work and, as he labours in the blistering heat of the Brazilian summer, becomes transfigured; remade into something else entirely.

Translated by Benjamin Moser

'The most important Brazilian woman writer of the twentieth century... The richness of The Apple in the Dark defies the explanatory power of any single interpretation' TLS