Covert Joy

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 story: 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 book: I was a woman with her lover