Complete Stories

Clarice Lispector published her first story when she was nineteen. Her last was written the year she died. In between, across forty years, she created a body of short fiction that has no parallel in world literature — stories in which the surface of ordinary life ruptures without warning into something vast and strange, in which a woman cleaning a chicken, a girl receiving a doll, a man encountering a stray dog suddenly confronts the full weight of existence.

All eighty-six of her stories are gathered here in Katrina Dodson’s landmark translation — the first time they have been available in English in their entirety. The range is extraordinary: from early stories influenced by European modernism to the late, radically compressed pieces in which Lispector’s singular voice reaches its fullest expression. Together they constitute one of the great achievements in the short story form, by one of the great writers of any language or any century.

A major literary event. Essential world literature. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.