The Woman Who Killed the Fish

“Lispector should be on the shelf with Kafka and Joyce.” – Los Angeles Times“Betterthan Borges.” – Elizabeth Bishop“Readers will delight in this short collection of luminous, laugh-out-loud stories from the late Brazilian cult writer Lispector…Though the author wrote these stories for her son when he was a child, and they often contain magic and lack in explanations, their small delights nonetheless rank high among Lispector’s impressive body of work. In between the lines of these spellbinding worlds, she offers indelible glimpses of the way people live and dream. Even amid the silliest of scenarios are glimmers of the beauty of the everyday: “That’s how life went on. Gently, gently.” This is one to savor. ” – Publishers Weekly“Bought pets, animals must either conform to our anthropomorphic lens or, as “uninvited natural creatures,” remain too repellent to merit our sympathy. The title story’s sly narrator implicates both herself and the reader, by justifying the fatal neglect of her son’s fish on her all-consuming work as a fiction writer.” – Thuy Dinh - National Public Radio“A writer of formidable modernist pedigree, it is something of a relief to find her working in a chatty, mischievous mode and concerned with that most storybook of subjects, the ‘intimate life’ of animals.” – J.W. McCormack - The New Left Review“The Brazilian writer’s work has had a recent public resurgence; we have been wowed as we discover or rediscover her writing by her seemingly pragmatic approach to the page, and by her characters, who appear confident in themselves and their thoughts even though, perhaps, they really aren’t.” – Miyako Pleines - Ploughshares

Clarice Lispector (1920–1977), the greatest Brazilian writer of the twentieth century, has been called “astounding” (Rachel Kushner), “a penetrating genius” (Donna Seaman, Booklist), and “one of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers” (Orhan Pamuk). General editor of the new translations of Clarice Lispector’s complete works at New Directions, BENJAMIN MOSER is the author of Why This World: The Biography of Clarice Lispector, and Sontag: Her Life and Work, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, will be published in October.