Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. He lives in the Netherlands.
After publishing a handful of stories around the time of the First World War, Fritz Grönloh, an Amsterdam businessman, wrote almost nothing until his death in 1961. His small body of work is about artistic abortion and the frivolity of writerly dreams. And his pseudonym with its built-in negative contained this resignation. Nescio is Latin for ‘I don’t know’; and in his...
In a TV interview she gave near the end of her life she said: ‘I went to a fortune-teller who told me about all kinds of good things that were about to happen to me and on the way home I thought it would...
Arguing about Sontag is one of the things that keeps her alive for us, as a figure of contention. We may end up arguing about her longer than we continue reading her, but that’s for posterity to decide.
‘You killed my character!’ Clarice Lispector said angrily to the nurse who stopped her from marching out of hospital the day before she died of ovarian cancer, aged 57, in 1977. The...
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