Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.

The Besieged City
240Overview
Seven decades after its original publication, Clarice Lispector’s third novelthe story of a girl and the city her gaze revealsis in English at last. Lucrécia Neves is ready to marry. Her suitorssoldierly Felipe, pensive Perseu, dependable Mateusare attracted to her tawdry not-quite-beauty, which is of a piece with Sao Geraldo, the rough-and-ready township she inhabits. Civilization is on its way to this place, where wild horses still roam. As Lucrécia is tamed by marriage, Sao Geraldo gradually expels its horses; and as the town strives for the highest attainment it can conceivea viaductit takes on the progressively more metropolitan manners that Lucrécia, with her vulgar ambitions, desires too. Yet it is precisely through this woman’s superficialityher identification with the porcelain knickknacks in her mother’s parlorthat Clarice Lispector creates a profound and enigmatic meditation on “the mystery of the thing.” Written in Europe shortly after Clarice Lispector’s own marriage, The Besieged City is a proving ground for the intricate language and the radical ideas that characterize one of her century’s greatest writersand an ironic ode to the magnetism of the material.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780811226714 |
---|---|
Publisher: | New Directions Publishing Corporation |
Publication date: | 04/30/2019 |
Pages: | 240 |
Sales rank: | 648,281 |
Product dimensions: | 5.70(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Benjamin Moser, the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, is the editor of ND’s Clarice Lispector translation series, of which this is the ninth volume. For Sontag: Her Life and Work, he won the Pulitzer Prize.
Johnny Lorenz, son of Brazilian immigrants to the United States, was born in 1972. He received his doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000, and he is an associate professor at Montclair State University. In 2013, he was a finalist for Best Translated Book for his translation of A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector (New Directions). His book of original poems, Education by Windows, was published in 2018 by Poets & Traitors Press; it includes his translations of the poet Mario Quintana, for which he received a Fulbright grant. He has published articles on Brazilian literature in journals such as Luso-Brazilian Review and Modern Fiction Studies. He is also the translator of Lispector's The Besieged City (New Directions).
Table of Contents
Obyezloshadenie Benjamin Moser vii
The Besieged City
1 The Hill in the Pasture 3
2 The Citizen 24
3 The Hunt 28
4 The Public Statue 58
5 In the Garden 81
6 Sketch of the City 93
7 The Alliance with the Outsider 105
8 The Betrayal 117
9 The Exposed Treasure 121
10 The Corn in the Field 149
11 The First Deserters 174
End of the Construction: The Viaduct 192
Appendix: A Response to a Response 203
Acknowledgments 213