Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas

For twenty-five years, between 1960 and 1985, Clarice Lispector wrote a weekly column for the Jornal do Brasil — and what she produced in those columns was not journalism. It was something else entirely: short, compressed, deeply personal pieces in which she thought aloud about everything from cooking and children to God, writing, death, and the precise texture of a particular morning’s light.

This Penguin Modern Classics volume collects the complete chronicles — more than five hundred of them — in their first complete English translation, offering the most intimate access to Lispector’s mind available anywhere. These are the pieces in which she was most directly herself: unguarded, funny, melancholy, curious, and always in the process of paying the deepest possible attention to the smallest possible things.

Essential for anyone who loves Lispector’s fiction — and an ideal entry point for readers who want to approach her obliquely, through a form that is more conversational and less formally demanding than her novels. One of the great literary discoveries of recent years. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.