The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door—crushing the cockroach—and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature…
Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”
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). Caetano Veloso is one of Brazil's foremost musicians. Idra Novey is the award-winning author of the novels Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. She teaches fiction in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.
“Shift in perception is a miracle” Death Valley by Melissa Broder is part desert survival story, part examination of grief — mixing the absurd with the profoundly human in a feat of imagination. Broder joins us to talk about the realities of anticipatory grief, incorporating fantastical elements into the real world, including humor in her […]
“I wrote this very simply to stay alive.” Alice Carrière’s beautiful and intense memoir of her unconventional childhood, her mental health journey through the failings of the psychiatric system and more that eventually led her to a life of reconciliation and reconstruction. Carrière joins us to talk about why she wrote the book now, the […]
