Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady

A wealthy young Brazilian woman — bored, beautiful, drunk on champagne at a party that has gone on too long — slips into a reverie that takes her somewhere she did not expect to go. In Clarice Lispector’s hands, this deceptively simple premise becomes one of the most precise and disturbing explorations of female interiority in twentieth-century fiction. Everything is in the surface of the prose — the textures of the silk dress, the weight of the champagne, the particular quality of the desire that rises and the shame that follows.

This Penguin Little Black Classic gathers one of Lispector’s most celebrated stories alongside two others, offering a concentrated introduction to a writer who remains unlike anyone else who has ever worked in the short story form. Her sentences spiral through sensation and consciousness with a logic that is emotional rather than linear — and yet they arrive, always, at something exact.

If you have never read Lispector, these few pages will show you immediately why she is considered one of the great writers of the twentieth century. If you have, this is essential. Published by Penguin.