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Book Cover for: The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition, Clarice Lispector

The Hour of the Star: 100th Anniversary Edition

Clarice Lispector

Hardcover
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Reader Score

81%

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Critic Reviews

Good

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The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. As Macabéa heads toward her absurd death, Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last book she takes readers close to the true mystery of life and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Oct 6th, 2020
  • Pages: 128
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.10in - 5.40in - 0.60in - 0.55lb
  • EAN: 9780811230049
  • Categories: • Hispanic & Latino• Literary• Women

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About the Author

Lispector, Clarice: - 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).
Valente, Paulo Gurgel: - Paulo Gurgel Valente was born in Washington, DC, in 1953, while his father was stationed in the Brazilian embassy. He has published books on economics and finance.
Moser, Benjamin: - 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.
Tóibín, Colm: - Colm Tóibín is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman professor of the humanities at Columbia University and succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester.

More books by Clarice Lispector

Book Cover for: Água Viva, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector
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Book Cover for: The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Complete Stories, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: A Breath of Life: Pulsations, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Apple in the Dark, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Covert Joy: Selected Stories, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Besieged City, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Almost True, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Chandelier, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: Selected Cronicas, Clarice Lispector
Book Cover for: The Woman Who Killed the Fish, Clarice Lispector

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Tara Stillions Whitehead
Tara Stillions Whitehead
@MrsWhitehouse74
2 years

🎞️ + 📚 | THE YEAR OF THE MONSTER (@UnsolicitedP 2022) | THEY MORE THAN BURNED (ELJ 2023) | notable Best American Essays 2022 | she/her

@aureleos You have to read Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star.

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Mentioner image for: Xande (he/him)
Xande (he/him)
@iamxande
2 years

✶ Latin, Brazilian, designer, immigrant, cyclist, dyslexic ✶ Opening doors to others that once were closed to me ✶ Head of Design at @timeneon #BlackLivesMatter

@tuhin The Hour of the Star by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

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Mentioner image for: Brandon Menke
Brandon Menke
@bamenke
2 years

Poet and assistant professor writing about 20/21 c. American literature and visual art, poetics, queer aesthetics, and transmediation. ig: @queer_lyricism

ugh SO relatable: “I write because I’m desperate and I’m tired, I can no longer bear the routine of being me and if not for the always novelty that is writing, I would die symbolically every day.” - Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Benjamin Moser https://t.co/iubNJ4NKMP

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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Most late work has a spectral beauty, a sense of form and content dancing a slow and skillful waltz with each other. Lispector, on the other hand, as she came to the end of her life, wrote as though her life was beginning, with a sense of a need to stir and shake narrative itself to see where it might take her, as the bewildered and original writer that she was, and us, her bewildered and excited readers.--Colm Tóibín
I'm really obsessed by this writer from Brazil, Clarice Lispector. I love her because she writes whole novels where not one thing happens--she describes the air. I think she's such a great, great novelist.--John Waters
Every page vibrates with feeling. It's not enough to say that Lispector bends language or uses words in new ways. Plenty of modernists do that. No one else writes prose this rich.--Lily Meyer "NPR"
Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century.--Parul Sehgal "The New York Times"
This new translation of The Hour of the Star reveals the mesmerizing force of the revitalized modernist's Rio-set tale of a young naif, who, along with the piquantly intrusive narrator, challenges the reader's notions of identity, storytelling, and love.--Meghan O'Grady "Vogue"

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