Covert Joy: Selected Stories

by Clarice Lispector, Rachel Kushner (introduction)

From the massive treasure house of her hugely successful Complete Stories, gathered here are the most glittering gems of Clarice Lispector’s short fiction


This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,”“Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title


Joy would always be covert for me… Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy.I was no longer a girl with a I was a woman with her lover

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literature, Classics, Literary Fiction

166 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 2025

About the author

Clarice Lispector was a Brazilian writer. Acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories, she was also a journalist. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, she was brought to Brazil as an infant, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.

She grew up in northeastern Brazil, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at age 23 with the publication of her first novel, 'Near to the Wild Heart' (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

She left Brazil in 1944, following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. Upon return to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she began producing her most famous works, including the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família), the great mystic novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.), and the novel many consider to be her masterpiece, Água Viva. Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories until her premature death in 1977.

She has been the subject of numerous books and references to her, and her works are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films, one being 'Hour of the Star' and she was the subject of a recent biography, Why This World, by Benjamin Moser.

Reviews

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

rtc later

[Jillian B · Rating 5 out of 5]

No writer understands the human condition quite like Clarice Lispector. Though these stories are short, there is such depth to each of the characters and their motivations. Her writing style is very Virginia Woolf, although slightly more accessible, and they give a voice to the experiences of everyday 20th century women, making the mundane profound. This story collection would make a great introduction to Lispector if you’ve been curious about her writing!

[Salem ☥ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Her body soothes itself with its own slightness compared to the vastness of the sea because it’s her body’s slightness that lets her stay warm and it’s this slightness that makes her a poor and free person, with her portion of a dog’s freedom on the sands. That body will enter the limitless cold that roars without rage in the silence of six o’clock. The woman doesn’t know it: but she’s fulfilling a courage. With the beach empty at this morning hour, she doesn’t have the example of other humans who transform the entry into the sea into a simple lighthearted game of living. She is alone.”

Unfortunately I'd already read most of these short stories, but I was pleasantly surprised by the new ones included. I was particularly fond of Dodson's ending conclusion.

[mari · Rating 5 out of 5]

i can re-read and re-read clarice and it is worthwhile every single time. she has a way of looking and seeing that reminds me of what writing can uniquely do: animate truth and art simultaneously. she reveals characters, feelings, social dynamics, and herself like light reveals a rose. i always find myself moving through life differently—more closely, with more attention—when i am in the midst of her.

some of my favorites:
- waters of the world
- remnants of carnival
- journey to petrópolis
- that’s where i’m going
- love
- mystery in sao cristóvao

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think I'm on Lispector's wavelength; most of these stories didn't hit for me. Reviewers write of "the magic of the mundane" and her "hypnotic" writing and I can see where they're coming from but I just didn't fall under her spell, I guess -- though I liked two of the stories: The Imitation of the Rose, in which a woman goes round and round in her head about every little action she might take (which might describe most of these stories, more or less); and The Foreign Legion, partially about a woman's interactions with an unusual neighbour child who comes to visit often, against her mother's wishes, and on this day is interested in the live chick in the woman's kitchen. I typically like psychological, introspective, odd novels but most of these stories felt tedious and uninteresting to me.

[Kaden]

I stopped halfway through for a long time and finally picked it back up to finish today. Some really incredible stories and some very confusing ones. But even in those mysterious stories the joy breaks through.

[Matthew Eck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my favorite Lispector - although her writing colored the mundane of domesticity, some of the stories stretched too far into the abstract for me

[Quinn Rennerfeldt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lispector is a poet’s prose-writer, a philosopher’s prose writer. A syntactical genius, an anxious wondered, a profound sketch-artist of the interior.

[yastikaguru · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The cruelty of the world was tranquil. The murder was deep.” Waaaaa

[Kate Curtis-Hawkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frustratingly brilliant in composition, the stories of Clarice Lispector are tales of human desire, housewives in mental crisis, and an incisive portrait of what it means to be a human being in society. She, more than probably any other writer in the late twentieth century, has taken up the mantel of Virgina Woolf. Using the simple plots of a trip to the zoo or the commute on a bus to explore the mental landscapes of human consciousness.

Reading these stories, one can get the sense that Clarice felt and saw too much. That simple empathy ruled her connection to the greater world around her. I can't prove it, but I'd imagine that existing inside of her head for an hour would be exhausting. The sheer amount of data, emotion, and thoughts she probably took in through the voyeuristic practice of being a writer is hard to calculate.

In To the Lighthouse, there is a section entitled Time Passes in which not much happens at all, but at the same time, everything happens. I realize a description like that seems vague, but I promise it's as specific as I can get in a review being written for a completely different book without turning this into a graduate thesis. Reading Lispector is sort of like reading Time Passes. An experience where women unraveling brings them closer to enlightenment and apotheosis, and a woman cooking an egg in a pan can be a meditation on the very nature of existence and the universe.

Her plots, as mentioned above, are simple. Yet she pushes the reader so deeply into the internal psychology of her characters that it's like reading the fine print on someone's subconscious. In a way, we're given more access to the why of a characters actions than the characters themselves likely have. An experience made all the better by her labyrinthine prose.

Clarice is not an easy writer to engage with, and I'm not even sure I could explain why. It would probably take someone well schooled in the actual construction of language to properly break down how it is that she manages to write sentences that are both so simple, and sometimes impenetrable. These stories vary in difficulty of narration, but she skews towards the complex in her choices of framing and writing if the sample size here is any indication of the rest of her work. As just a small taste of what I mean, consider this quote:

"No, not this past carnival. But I don't know why this one transported me back to my childhood and those Ash Wednesdays on the dead streets where the remains of streamers and confetti fluttered. The occasional devout woman with a veil covering her head would be heading to church, crossing the street left so incredibly empty after Carnival. Until the next year. And when the celebration was fast approaching, what could explain the inner tumult that came over me? As if the budding world were finally opening into a big scarlet rose. As if the streets and squares of Recife were finally explaining why they'd been made. As if human voices were finally singing the capacity for pleasure that was kept secret in me. Carnival was mine, mine."

Just look at the first two sentences there. She begins her narration in the middle of a quote or answering of a question, but it's not in quotation marks. At the same time she mixes the time period she's referring to by declaring it's not last year's Carnival, but a completely different one that is also not this years Carnival. All of which doesn't even get into her continual playing of time period across the whole paragraph as she makes references to her childhood, the citizens, and the founding of the city.

To be able to write like she does and not completely confuse the reader, or make your text overly difficult, is nothing short of a miracle, or at the very least, a sign of genius. I can't even imagine the difficulty in translating her prose into English. Yet, here we are, in a day in age in which all of her work has been made accessible to a wider audience. A fact which I am beyond thankful for.

I could be wrong, since I have not read any of her other work, but this small collection seems like the perfect place to begin exploring the complexity that is Clarice Lispector. It contains work from every era of her career, one of her newspaper columns, long work, and significantly shorter work. At this point, I feel that everyone should engage with her work, if only to experience the gram of radium that burned so brightly within her. That we might all see that there was a second Virgina Woolf who lived mostly in Brazil, died many decades ago, and left behind a treasure trove of wisdom that might help us understand each other just a little bit better.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my first short story collections that I’ve read! At first I thought, man I do not think I’m smart enough for some of these stories. But when I read the translator’s note for the book, she quotes Lispector as saying even SHE didn’t understand some aspects, and I was relieved.

She fits well with the women writers in the late 1900’s that have stories about femininity and regular life feeling monotonous. She tells stories in a very interesting way and I’m never expecting where the story will go. I really enjoyed them even if I don’t understand it all!

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

She delivers every time

[Benjamin Cuthrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of what Clarice does best in her short stories which are really not like her novels at all. They are spare like Hemingway’s short stories and adhere to most of the conventions of realism but they suggest something higher or even mystical at times. I feel the hollowness you feel on a slow day or when you awake from a nap. For A Tale of So Much Love alone this would be a 5: it has a depth and visceral impact that I can’t shake. I really would love to know how chickens came to figure so in her thought.

[Erin Brinkman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m not sure what to think of this book. Each individual paragraph was one of the most beautiful I’d ever read. But then put together as a continuous short story, I had no idea what was happening. What’s with the chickens and eggs. Why are so many women overcome with life-altering emotions after “events” like… seeing a blind man or a rose or a buffalo. What am I not getting here. Are my SSRIs too strong for me to be moved by these small madnesses

[kisara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this collection … I annotated this for suneri’s bday and I should have written and typed a review then and there when I finished it. Also, SUNERI don’t read this unless u finished reading!!

Each story is an act of unearthing the pearls out of the mouth of an oyster. Not all of the stories struck me in the moment, but each one lingers in the mind’s eye like a scent that evokes a definitive memory. The incense that stalls, one’s mother’s perfumes, the frying of onion and garlic on a hot pan. Every one of these stories I still think about. Covert joys offers a glimpse into Lispector’s prowess on full and unadulterated display. Of the Complete Stories, each one of these stories was collected with complete intention and care.

But more importantly, beyond the museum of Clarice’s talent, this collection distills its the ways in which she views and processes the world into its pure essence. This is the most important part, reading a perspective of the world sometimes so startlingly divorced or so twinned to one’s own —written in a way so very enduring and permeating into the interior world— that it changes and shocks everything. That is to say Clarice writes with a distinctive voice I’ve never witnessed before, one that is all her own. Her mind is truly one of one. Can’t wait to read the Complete Stories <3

[Kristen Wilcox]

I started reading this on my 31st birthday when I was 9 months pregnant. One night it fell behind the couch and stayed there (I was too pregnant to reach and too defeated to ask John). A month after my baby was born a friend came to stay with us and retrieved it while she was cleaning. I read the rest of the stories out loud to my daughter. This doesn’t really tell you anything about the book but I’m writing it here so that I remember it. Anyway when will goodreads add a “like” option like they have on letterboxd.

[Katherine M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms.Clarice Lispector. I get it now. This collection was amazing. Although translated from Portuguese, nothing felt lost in the process. If this version is even a fraction of Lispector’s original prose, then the Portuguese must be incredible. All that to say, I smiled several times…. and cried even more.

…Ok maybe a bit dramatic but she deserves it.

[Castles · Rating 5 out of 5]

for me, Lispector is one of the bet authors of all time, so what can I say other than - magnificent, magical, inspiring? most of the stories here show up on other books and of course, her "Complete Work", and still I find a little difference here, if I'm not mistaken, it's also a new translation, but I'm not sure of that.

[Beyza Çalışkan]

"Oh, dog, where is your soul? Is it at the edge of your body? I am at the edge of my body. And I waste away slowly. What am I saying? I am saying love. And at the edge of love are we."

[Emily TarBush · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this in 2 hours

[Janna Gornik · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the trees the fruits were black, sweet like honey. On the ground were dried pits full of circumvolutions, like little rotting brains. The bench was stained with purple juices. With intense gentleness the waters murmured. Clinging to the tree trunk were the luxuriant limbs of a spider. The cruelty of the world was tranquil. The murder was deep. And death was not what we thought”

[coco's reading · Rating 5 out of 5]

Covert Joy was 100% a cover buy, but I'd already been interested in Lispector's short fiction and how it would compare to something like The Apple in the Dark. I still plan on reading more of her novels, but I have a gut feeling her short stories and crónicas are where I'll be planting my flag. Not every story here was a new favorite, but I found something to ponder and appreciate in all of them. Lispector captures the patternless process of how human thoughts jump around in content and even time, yet there's a grounding quality to her work: the characters with their wants and pettiness feel real, the stories inhabited.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

This latest collection of stories from New Directions by the iconic Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector contains twenty stories. From the afterword by the translator: Most of the stories in this unique edition come from Clarice Lispector’s two most famous collections, Family Ties (1960) and The Foreign Legion (1964), which mark the period considered her golden era, when critical acclaim converged with popular success, after she’d struggled to publish her books during the prior decade............... The first eight of these selected stories, from “Love” to “The Buffalo,” comprise over half of Family Ties, a bestseller that won Brazil’s top literary prize. The writer Erico Verissimo called it “the most important story collection published in this country since Machado de Assis,” and one critic hailed Clarice as “one of the best Brazilian writers of all time.”..............The next seven selections, from “Monkeys” to “Mineirinho,” come from The Foreign Legion, much of which was published in magazines and newspapers in the 1960s, though the earliest, “Journey to Petrópolis,” first appeared in 1949. It also includes the two stories that Clarice singled out as her favorites: “The Egg and the Chicken” and “Mineirinho,”...............The last five stories feature in collections published during Clarice’s final decade. The classics “Covert Joy” and “Remnants of Carnival” conjure her childhood in Brazil’s northeastern city of Recife and appeared in Covert Joy (1971) alongside the hypnotic reverie, “The Waters of the World.”

So once we are through the contents of this book, we should go into the particulars of her writing style. But firstly, I must mention here that I am not a fan or follower of her style. Indeed, the first Lispector book I had read The Passion According to G.H. fell flat on me and left me frankly bemused. Not that I hated the book in its entirety- there was enough brilliant writing in it to seduce me to finish it. But certainly there are elements in her style that are too introspective to be compulsively readable. Yet there were instances when she had been named a Brazilian Virginia Woolf, a female Kafka, as well as a Chekhov on the beach. Well, to speak the truth, she had the quality enough to be ranked among such a hallowed category, more so especially when you confine yourselves to the constraints of the short story. She was definitely an innovator, but the one drawback I have witnessed with her style, in both the novel and the short story form, is the lack of a convincing plot- a lacuna in her style that leads to the lack of a convincing denouement. In this and elsewhere, she has a little in common with the late, great Roberto Bolano. But while the Chilean master was far from introspective and always had an engaging idea for a plot, Lispector fails to engage her readers with an eventful storyline, but instead goes ahead into an introspective soliloquy of her main character. And to speak the truth, she was never interested in many characters, but the sole character that she tries to build up a story with indulges in deeply introspective monologues, more particularly on the causes and consequences of their every act in the narrative. This becomes so much like a sort of creative confession in extreme cases.

Finally in utter defense of her creative style here is a fragment from one of her last stories That’s Where I’m Going (“É para lá que eu vou”)- one which comes from her April 1974 collection,Where Were You at Night- and which, according to the translator Katrina Dodson "the closest thing to a prose poem that Clarice wrote, and a fitting farewell".

Beyond the ear there is a sound, at the far end of sight a view, at the tips of the fingers an object—that’s where I’m going.
At the tip of the pencil the line.
Where a thought expires is an idea, at the final breath of joy another joy, at the point of the sword magic—that’s where I’m going.
At the tips of the toes the leap.
It’s like the story of someone who went and didn’t return—that’s where I’m going.
Or am I? Yes, I’m going. And I’ll return to see how things are. Whether they’re still magic. Reality? I await you all. That’s where I’m going.

Yes, she gave the feeling of poetry shadowed by introspective prose that will frankly bemuse some readers. "In it, she leaves us, as always, with a question—What am I saying?—and at the edge of love."

My favorite picks from this collection are the stories 'The Smallest Woman in the World', 'The Egg and the Chicken', and one of her final stories, 'He Drank Me Up'. The story 'The Egg and the Chicken' is something really unusual and left me even more bemused than her novel 'The Passion According to G.H.' While reading it, I was under the spell that she was trying to decode the eternal mystery: 'What came first? The Egg or the Chicken?' In a sense, I was correct, for her most elusive story is "a meditation on the impossibility of truly perceiving and conceiving a thing (the egg)".
From the translator's afterword: Clarice called the story “a mystery to me” and would put herself on the side of the chicken. But I can’t help thinking of this relationship of translator to author, or translation to original, in these terms: the chicken as unlikely keeper of the egg.

Clarice Lispector challenged the most familiar trends in storywriting because she was, like Woolf, an explorer of inner worlds; but she was, quite unlike Woolf, not one who championed the 'stream of consciousness' technique in literature, nor does she delve into more complex psychological themes like a Dostoyevsky or a Henry James. Hers is introspective poetry of a rather fanciful sort, that can be either an eulogy or an elegy...

The writer Rachel Kushner, in her foreword, writes:

The fruits of her project—both an art and a philosophy (ontological, but also chosen, deliberate, developed)—are strangely restorative. While reading itself is not passive, you can relax, while she is hard at work, asking questions that are inside you, too, so that you yourself don’t have to frame them. Her aspiration is nothing less than to uncover the bizarre mystery of consciousness, to contemplate being while being, to apprehend life while living it.

And certainly, this collection is not a celebration of wanton storytelling, it is about people and their epiphanies with an aura of mystery that eludes even the most supreme exponents of human psyche. I think there will be time enough for me to delve deeper into her Complete Stories. Maybe it is not about her novels, but I will be still be engaged with her stories.

[frankngrrl · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.”

My first foray into Lispector’s work and I am blown away. I’m smitten. This was such an undeniably delightful book to read. I’m in love with her writing style, her stories, her words, with her. So much to unpack and unravel with every story. She’s amazing. I can’t wait to read more of her work and try out her novels. Life is beautiful because good books exist <3

[Zach Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first book I've read by her.

In hindsight, I made the mistake of getting way too hyped based on everything I had read about Lispector on Reddit and Instagram/BookTok. I went into this collection hoping to have my mind blown (a bad and mistaken approach for any work) and instead ended up just kinda liking it.

There are two poles of short stories that I love: at one end, Borges (brief, incredibly mystical and philosophical, powered by a truly one in a billion imagination) and at the other, Munro (longer, patient, opaque domestic scenes that seem mundane but somehow tear your heart out or leave you with an indescribable sense of longing).

Lispector's stories fell in a weird in-between area for me. The domestic scenes are there, but as a stage setting for philosophical musings on interiority that mostly weren't super potent for me. I feel like I was out of sync with many of the stories; by the time I was getting into the groove and starting to get interested, the story was ending. I kept thinking that everything needed just a bit more space to breathe.

Perhaps this collection can be used to calibrate my expectations before I jump into her novels, because I DO want to read more of her.

Thoughts and notes:

....

The complex nature of human love and benevolence is a recurring theme throughout nearly all of the stories in this collection.

How close clemency and benevolence are to condescension. How love can be nurturing and beneficial, but also smothering and detrimental. How it can give life as easily as it can kill. How love can be selfish — how it can harm or even maim the recipient, but because it feels so good to love, the giver of the love is completely unaware of the harm they're causing.

....

The unbelievable power present in each human being, even children. How each of us, like minor gods, wields the power of life and death over smaller, "lesser" creatures (like chickens, or cockroaches, or monkeys, or even the homeless) in ways we barely notice. How realizing that power and tempering it is a vital though frightening part of becoming an adult. How we all have the potential for violence, for causing death, and how circumstance is the only thing that separates those who utilize that power from those who don't.

....

How the perception of an interior life of a thing is correlated (often unconsciously) with its worth.

Animals and the elderly, among other beings, are assumed to be incapable of (or in possession of a deteriorated level of) interior complexity, and they are infantilized or disregarded accordingly.

....

At least a couple stories in this collection basically show that the contradiction between being an intellectually complex, contemplative, reflective human being and living as a housewife will make you go crazy.

....

At times, I feel the stories were directly confronting what it means to have value as a woman in society. Is a woman valuable as long as she can reproduce? As long as she can work and care for children? When she can no longer have children, and when she is too old to work, what is to be done with her then? How do we treat those women?

Happy Birthday and Journey to Petrópolis were especially poignant to me in this regard.

[Trinette Hunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

two favorite stories: “the imitation of the rose” & “the foreign legion”

quotes at large:
all around was a silent, slow, persistent life. horror, horror.

no longer that terrible independence.

and also because a pretty thing was meant for giving or receiving, not just having.

her appearance had finally surpassed her and, going beyond her, was serenely becoming gigantic.

yet she didn’t repeat it anymore. because truth was a glimpse.

not being devoured is the secret goal of an entire life.

strength flowed back and forth through her heart in weighty abundance.

yet i sleep the sleep of the righteous because i know that my life doesn’t interfere with the march of great time.

signs— everything swallowed up by speed.

even sleepier than i is the room from the perspective of its tile floor. and in the darkness of dawn, a purplish glow that distances everything.

a thing peeping on its own rouses that ever so gentle curiosity that beside a manger is worship.

concatenation

up until the next day i was transformed in the very hope of joy itself: i wasn’t living, i was swimming slowly in a gentle sea, the waves carrying me to and fro.

what am i saying? i am saying love. and at the edge of love are we.

[special shoutout to my sweet boyfriend for treating me to this brand new edition while i was stuck at home, sick]

[Ludovica Ciasullo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alcune di queste storie rimarranno con me a lungo: il racconto di Ofelia che quando si concede di essere se stessa è giocosa ma anche spietata; la pazzissima scena di una donna che beve l'acqua di mare; la fatica di Ana nel ritornare alla sua quotidianità dopo che ha sbattuto contro la brutale confusione della vita; la gioia clandestina della giovane lettrice, protagonista del racconto che dà il titolo alla raccolta; il cinismo spietato della matriarca la cui compleanno; e naturalmente la gallina evasa. Questo articolo sottolinea il ruolo delle metamorfosi e dei risvegli che percorrono la raccolta, anche se più che decodificato il testo va inalato: ci sono tanti di quegli aromi sovrapposti, inclusa qualche folata di decomposizione e marciume, che anche provare a separarli è un esercizio futile, goderne è una gioia tanto complessa quanto accessibile.

[John Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐
It'd be difficult and time consuming to write a full review of these 20 stories, which are the first I've read of Lispector.
She's the genuine article - distinctive, insightful, obtuse, colorful, and completely wrapped up in her characters' dilemmas and psychological wrestling.
At least two stories were utter head scratchers: Mystery in Sao Cristovao and Temptation.
The tension and repetition in Love and in The Imitation of the Rose require some patient reading, as does the Egg and the Chicken.
My 5 favorites:
Happy Birthday
The Smallest Woman in the World
Journey to Petropolis

and especially
Mineirinho
and The Foreign Legion

Honorable mentions:
Remnants of Carnival and The Buffalo

[AN R · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first time I’ve been able to say with confidence that I’ve disliked a particular translation. Incredibly clumsy. In, I suppose, an effort to preserve Lispector’s idiosyncratic style, quite a bit of the sentence syntax was left alone as the words were translated. This was a bad choice. I have no idea why an editor would let that stand.

[Jason Fickett · Rating 4 out of 5]

My two favorite stories were The Egg and the Chicken and The Foreign Legion. I can see the connections to Virginia Woolf, especially in The Foreign Legion, though I think I liked Lispector's writing more. It seemed both stranger and more playful in its experimentation.