Covert Joy

Twenty of the greatest Clarice Lispector stories selected from the trove of her amazing short fiction, now in paperback with a personal new preface by her son.

Covert Joy is an electric volume starring such landmark Clarice Lispector stories as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” As expressed in the title story, Covert Joy offers all the bliss that only a great book can bring: Joy would always be covert for me. . . Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.

These stories embody all the many wonders of Clarice Lispector’s short fiction and were selected from Complete Stories, named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, BBC, Vogue, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. “Clarice Lispector’s stories are strangely restorative,” as Rachel Kushner remarks in her foreword. “While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them. Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it. Someone has to do this work. Lispector seems to have recognized that she had a gift for the job and plunged in.”