Ad Policy. Statue of Clarice Lispector at Leme Beach in Rio de Janeiro, 2016. (Photo by Luiz Souza / NurPhoto) Like dangerous talismans, Clarice Lispector’s novels stage unholy communions ...

Clarice Lispector, Trans. from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson. New Directions, $28.95 (640p) ISBN 978-0-8112-1963-1. Reviewed by Valeria Luiselli.

Clarice Lispector’s bizarre, challenging, and dazzling writing has become integral to the Brazilian literary canon, and has attracted a small but fierce cult following around the world.

By Clarice Lispector, translated from the Portuguese by Katrina Dodson, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser. New Directions, 640 pp., $28.95. Rachel Shteir is the author of three books.

The first word of Clarice Lispector’s newly translated 1969 novel, “An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures,” is not a word at all, but a mark: a comma.

Thus begins Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life, which collects the hundreds of crônicas, or vignettes, the Brazilian novelist wrote for the country’s press between 1967 and 1977.

Books & the Arts / To understand the philosophical dimensions of her fiction you must read her 1961 novel The Apple in the Dark. Shaj Mathew Like dangerous talismans, Clarice Lispector’s novels ...