Description
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.”
Reviews
"Her images dazzle even when her meaning is most obscure, and when she is writing of what she despises she is lucidity itself." — The Times Literary Supplement
"Lispector is one of the hidden geniuses of twentieth century literature, in the same league as Flann O’Brien, Borges and Pessoa… utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing." — Colm Tóibín
"A truly remarkable writer." — Jonathan Franzen
"We now finally have a translation worthy of Clarice Lispector's inimitable style. Go out and buy it." — The Guardian
"It is jarring and yet restorative to read a writer whose focus is so private, internal." — Boston Globe
"One of 20th-century Brazil’s most intriguing and mystifying writers." — The L Magazine
"There's a feeling of encountering something completely new and classic at the same time." — Time Out Chicago
"I had a sort of missionary urge with her...but I started thinking, even when I was 19: How can I help this person reach the prominence she deserves?" — Benjamin Moser, San Francisco Chronicle
"You could breeze through it, you could let it marinate, or you could reread it twice in one sitting." — Vanity Fair
Also By: Clarice Lispector 
The Besieged City
Paperback, 2024
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
The Apple in the Dark
Paperback, 2023
“The best one,” as Clarice Lispector called The Apple in the Dark, her famously intense 1961 novel
The Woman Who Killed the Fish
Hardback, 2022
Four beguiling tales for children of all ages.
A surprising new facet of Clarice Lispector’s genius
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas
Paperback, 2022
In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas—short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces—are the delicious canapés
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas
E Book, 2022
In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas—short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces—are the delicious canapés
Also By: Benjamin Moser
Portraits in Life and Death
Hardback, 2024
A new edition of the cult classic photography book by the legendary Peter Hujar, featuring a foreword by Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin MoserThe Besieged City
Paperback, 2024
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 townThe Apple in the Dark
Paperback, 2023
“The best one,” as Clarice Lispector called The Apple in the Dark, her famously intense 1961 novel
The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters
Hardback, 2023
A Washington Post Notable Book of 2023
Plunged into a strange land at twenty-five, Benjamin Moser began an obsessive, decades-long study of the Dutch Masters to set his world right again.The Woman Who Killed the Fish
Hardback, 2022
Four beguiling tales for children of all ages.
A surprising new facet of Clarice Lispector’s genius
