Benjamin Moser

"Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting ... the country's great museums. Inside these old buildings, he discovered the remains of the Dutch Golden Age, and began to unearth the strange, inspiring, and terrifying stories of the artists who gave shape to one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity. Beyond the sainted Rembrandt--who harbored a startling darkness--and the mysterious...

"From one of the greatest modern writers, these stories, gathered from the nine collections published during her lifetime, follow an unbroken time line of success as a writer, from her adolescence to her death bed." --

When three unpopular police officers are killed by an assassin in Rio de Janeiro, 12th Precinct chief Espinosa links another death to the murders and finds things complicated by a government official's wife, who has become obsessed with the case.

Inspector Espinosa unwittingly ignites the obsessions of a menacing misanthrope in the latest from the highly acclaimed mystery author An elderly lady approaches the front desk at the Twelfth Precinct in Copacabana and demands to speak with the chief. Tired after a long day, she leaves without further explanation, promising to return. Two hours later, Doña Laureta is dead, and witnesses' accounts vary as to whether she was pushed or fell in front...

"Fresh from the enormous success of her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, Hurricane Clarice let loose something stormier in 1946 with her second novel, The Chandelier. In a body of work renowned for its potent idiosyncratic genius, The Chandelier in many ways has pride of place. "It stands out," her biographer Benjamin Moser noted, "in a strange and difficult body of work, as perhaps her strangest and most difficult book." Of glacial intensity,...

""It's the best one," Clarice Lispector remarked on the occasion of the publication of The Apple in the Dark: "I can't define it, how it is, I can only say that it's much better constructed than the previous ones." A book in three chapters, with three central characters, The Apple in the Dark is in fact highly sculpted, while being chiefly a metaphysical book, and in this stunning new translation, the novel's mysteries and allegories glow with a fresh...

"While explaining to her sons why their fish is dead, the author relates stories of memorable animals in her life."--

""The book itself is strange-part Faulknerian meditation on the perversities, including sexual, of degenerate country folk; part Dostoevskian examination of good and evil and God-but in its strangeness lies its rare power, and in the sincerity and seriousness with which the essential questions are posed lies its greatness."--Benjamin Moser, from the introduction. Long considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century Brazilian literature,...