Covert Joy: Selected Stories
About this ebook
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
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About the author
Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 to a Jewish family in western Ukraine. As a result of the anti-Semitic violence they endured, the family fled to Brazil in 1922, and Clarice Lispector grew up in Recife. Following the death of her mother when Clarice was nine, she moved to Rio de Janeiro with her father and two sisters, and she went on to study law. With her husband, who worked for the foreign service, she lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and the United States, until they separated and she returned to Rio in 1959; she died there in 1977. Since her death, Clarice Lispector has earned universal recognition as Brazil’s greatest modern writer. New Directions publishes eighteen of her books.
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.
