Lispector at her most philosophically radical. A meditation on the nature of life and time, Água Viva (1973) shows Lispector discovering a new means of writing about herself, more deeply transforming …
Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has …
The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest for identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an obliqu…
G.H., a well-to-do Rio sculptress, enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white 'as in an insane asylum from which dangerous objects have been removed'. There she sees a cockroach - black,…
For readers accustomed to the relatively undramatic standard translations of Prometheus Bound , this version by James Scully, a poet and winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize, and C. John Herington, one o…
The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men simply waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. Th…
Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935,…
We have a marvelous, almost legendary image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic …
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories, and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our t…
A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism…
A collection of poems featuring works by Cope such as "Bloody Men", "Men and their Boring Arguments" and "Two Cures for Love". Other collections include "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" and the long n…
The Unnamable consists entirely of a disjointed monologue from the perspective of an unnamed (presumably unnamable) and immobile protagonist. There is no concrete plot or setting - and whether the oth…
Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style rem…
