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  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241371350
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $30.00

The Apple in the Dark




'The best one', as Clarice herself described it - her great mystical masterpiece

In the mistaken belief that he has killed his wife, Martim flees the city and arrives, in a state of both fear and wonder, at a remote ranch. There, he will have to remake himself, emerging, from the beast-like state in which his crime has plunged him, to the fullness of a reinvented humanity. Along the way, he will mark the lives of the two women who run the ranch, brambly, authoritarian Vitória and her weepy cousin Ermelinda. But the real drama is interior: Clarice Lispector's most wrenching, and most intoxicating, exploration of how a man becomes a human - and of how language can transform a life into a destiny.

A highly sculpted, metaphysical book whose mysteries and allegories glow with a scintillating light, Apple in the Dark is a masterpiece by "one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century'" (Colm Tóibín).

Translated by Benjamin Moser.

  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241371350
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $30.00

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Praise for The Apple in the Dark

Lispector is the premier Latin American woman prose writer of this century

The New York Times Book Review

Clarice Lispector left behind an astounding body of work that has no real corollary inside literature or outside it

Rachel Kushner, Bookforum

Brilliant and unclassifiable: glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce

Edmund White

One of the true originals of Latin American literature

Terrence Rafferty, The New York Times Book Review

A genius on the level of Nabokov

Jeff VanderMeer, Slate

Sphinx, sorceress, sacred monster. The revival of the hypnotic Clarice Lispector has been one of the true literary events of the twenty-first century

Parul Seghal, The New York Times