The crônica is a particularly Brazilian form: part newspaper column, part miniature essay, part overheard thought.

Lispector’s versions move through domestic disorder, insomnia, children, animals, vanity, exhaustion, class, love and sudden metaphysical terror, often beginning with something trivial before opening a trapdoor beneath it. A drawer that needs tidying becomes a problem of inner order; an encounter with a stranger becomes an ethical crisis; a passing sensation expands until the self can no longer remain comfortably intact.

Written for newspapers between 1967 and 1973, these pieces show Lispector in a more public and apparently casual register than her novels, though “casual” is camouflage. The voice is intimate, comic, impatient, wounded and startlingly direct. She writes about her own life while continually disturbing the stability of the person called Clarice: autobiography becomes anecdote, fiction, confession and performance at once. The collection is an unusually generous entry into her work, but also essential for readers interested in the strange territory between literature and daily life—where a column written for tomorrow’s paper can suddenly confront eternity.

New Directions, 1996. First New Directions paperback edition. Light rubbing and minor marks to covers, with slight edge wear; internally clean and sound.