Contiene i racconti: "Come sono nate le stelle" ; "La donna che uccise i pesci" ; "La vita intima di Laura" ; "Una storia quasi vera" (titoli originali: "Como nasceram as estrelas" ; "A muhler que matou os peixes" ; "A vida ìntima de Laura" ; "Quase de verdade"). La scrittrice brasiliana-ebrea-russa, intellettuale sofisticata, viaggiatrice cosmopolita continuamente divisa tra il suo Brasile e l'Europa, tra la sua Rio de Janeiro e New York, ha voluto convertire la sua smagata sapienza di scrittrice nell'apparente paradosso di una disarmante, infantile semplicità. Il volume presenta quindi storie di sogno, segnate da una stagionalità australe, in cui a giugno "si accendono i fuochi" e viene il tempo "di mangiare le patate dolci con un bel caffè bollente", mentre al cielo estivo di gennaio è riservato il compito di popolarsi di miriadi di stelle-bambini. Storie di foreste e di fiumi, di alberi dai frutti succosi, di pantere che salgono in cielo aggrappate a una liana.
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.
