Book coverWe are pleased to announce a new forthcoming title in Legenda: After Clarice: Reading Lispector’s Legacy in the Twenty-First Century edited by Adriana X. Jacobs and Claire Williams, which will be volume 14 in our Transcript series.

This is the second Legenda title announced today and, curiously, the second one where the cover image has a family connection. Whereas the cover of Georg Hermann: A Writer’s Life is a painting now belonging to Georg Hermann's great-grandson, the extraordinary collage image on the cover of our new Lispector book is by Clarice Lispector's granddaughter, the artist Mariana Valente. (See this Pinterest or this blog post for some more of her work.)

Clarice — she is one of those authors whose admirers call her by her first name — now has three books about her on the Legenda list, which is an impressive feat for someone who died only in 1977. The first Brazilian novelist to make it into Penguin Modern Classics, Clarice has always been an international figure, who lived abroad for much of her life as the wife of a diplomat. In Switzerland, 'a cemetary of sensations', she discovered true boredom. But she had a better time in London and Washington. Having 'married well', as people would have said in her day, she spent much of her life as the talented, glamorous wife of a more famous husband: now, of course, he is remembered largely for having been her husband. Her Wikipedia page is over 5000 words long, even in English Wikipedia; his is 253 words and available only in German.

Perhaps surprisingly, she was born not in Brazil but in a shtetl in the Ukraine, where she was called Chaya. Since she was moved to Brazil at the age of one, she can hardly have remembered it personally, but it must make her South America's most important Jewish writer. More than most novelists, Clarice was a citizen of the post-war world, and the recent uptick in translations of her work make her a worthy subject for Transcript. We hope to publish in 2020.


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