Unknown Pleasures

She “looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virignia Woolf” but the novelist Clarice Lispector is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. In Brazil however, she’s legendary—her face adorns postage stamps and her novels are sold in subway vending machines. Harper’s columnist Benjamin Moser has spent years researching the enigmatic Lispector’s life, from her childhood in the nightmarish landscape of post-WWI Ukraine to literary high society on Copacabana Beach. Why This World is his fascinating biography of the writer described as the “Brazilian Borges.”