A brief survey of the short story, part 56: Clarice Lispector

In The Apple in the Dark, the novel Clarice Lispector completed in 1956, she writes about a man "abashed in front of the white page". His task is "not to write down something that already existed but to create something that would then come to exist". This challenge is one all Lispector's work confronts as it cuts away, sentence by sentence, at conventional conceptions of reality. Again and again she and her characters – the latter often against their will – penetrate beyond the everyday into what she describes in one story as "stranger activity". Her vivid and mysterious bibliography is the fascinating record of this process.