One of the great literary discoveries of the past decade, for the English-speaking world, is the work of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), the sui generis writer who was born in Ukraine but lived most of her life in Brazil after her Jewish family fled pogroms. Benjamin Moser’s 2009 biography, Why This World, sparked wider interest in Lispector’s life and work, and the publication, six years later, of The Complete Stories, translated from Portuguese by Katrina Dodson and edited by Moser, gave U.S. readers the full flavor of her elegant and unsettling prose. In a starred review, a Kirkus critic called the 640-page volume “long overdue” and “essential.”
For those yet to plumb the depths of that collection comes a more compact survey, Covert Joy: Selected Stories (New Directions, March 18), with an introduction by American novelist Rachel Kushner (The Flamethrowers, Creation Lake). Lispector’s mission in these 19 stories, Kushner writes, is to “uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it.” The consciousness might be that of a housewife returned to her household after hospitalization for a mental breakdown (“The Imitation of the Rose”) or even a fowl who escapes her fate as Sunday dinner—briefly—by laying a fortuitously timed egg (“A Chicken”).
I’ve been savoring the unfamiliar cadences and unpredictable insights of Lispector’s fiction as we prepared our third International Issue. Along with Lispector, there are few writers who better embody the spirit of the issue than Zanzibar-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, who appears on the cover and talks with contributing writer Gregory McNamee about his novel Theft (Riverhead, March 18). Gurnah’s fiction has been published in the U.S. since the 1980s, but the bestowal of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2021 brought new attention to his work and its brilliant unpacking of colonialism, revolution, and exile. Our starred review calls Theft a “tightly constructed family drama with surprising complications.”
One of my favorite discoveries of early 2025 is a jewellike Austrian import: The Café With No Name by Robert Seethaler, translated by Katy Derbyshire (Europa Editions, Feb. 25). In this novel, we’re given a vivid portrait of 1960s Vienna and its working-class inhabitants, among them Robert Simon, a war orphan who opens a café in the market square; Mila, the robust factory girl who comes to work as a waitress there; and René Wurm, the drunken wrestler who awkwardly courts her. Our starred review calls it a “gem of a novel, whimsical and bittersweet but never sentimental, with indelible characters and a powerful sense of place.”
It's always a pleasure to have a new novel from Australian writer Michelle de Kretser, who was born in Sri Lanka and now lives in Sydney. I’ve been a fan since reading her shrewd 2018 novel, The Life To Come. Since then, she’s been a Kirkus Prize finalist for Scary Monsters in 2022; her latest offering, Theory & Practice (Catapult, Feb. 18), is a slim, sly novel about a graduate student and frustrated novelist (we’re shown several pages of her stalled attempt) in 1980s Melbourne whose icons and ideals (Virginia Woolf, feminism) are tested by life. Like the many other international books highlighted in the issue, it’s a most welcome arrival from abroad.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
