Too Much of Life

No two columns are alike: strands of dialogue, observed scenes, diaristic entries, life advice, even the author admiring herself in the mirror . . . Too Much of Life is a huge addition to an already impressive collection of evidence that Lispector could transcribe a guestbook and make it interesting

J. Howard Rosier, Vulture, Best New Books

In 1967, Brazil's leading newspaper asked the avant-garde writer Lispector to write a weekly column on any topic she wished. For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were . . . Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era's most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths. Superb, wonderfully obsessed with exuberance and what it unlocks and reveals

Publisher's Weekly

This is Clarice Lispector as one-woman chorus and psychic weather forecaster, and the charm, wit and engagement that she brings to her columns transcends barriers

John Biscello, Riot Material

An emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce

Edmund White

Plenty of writers inspire fierce devotion in their readers... but no one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans that she's known by a single name: "Clarice"

New Republic

She writes with sensuous verve, bringing her earliest passions into adult life intact, along with a child's undiminished capacity for wonder

The New York Times Book Review

For those unfamiliar with her, this book opens a door into her uniquely challenging and rewarding body of work . . . the pieces, some amounting to a few sentences, some many pages long, make up a self-portrait in bits and pieces. The result is, like Lispector herself, witty, mystical, surreal and profound: a treasure to return to again and again

Madoc Cairns, Guardian

Her crônicas - short pieces of observational writing inflected by personal experience but aimed at illuminating something larger - came after her novels, and met with great acclaim... Reading Lispector is unlike reading anyone else...the texts collected in Too Much Life evidence a perspicacious and playful mind keen to share in the magic and mystery of living.

Franklin Nelson, Financial Times

The closest thing we have to an autobiography by Lispector and contain many rewarding reflections on her own work . . . thrillingly unpredictable . . . singular visitations from a brilliant entity

Nick Holdstock, Literary Review

Lispector writes and thinks like nobody else, sending her readers off to look at the world through strange new lispectacles

Miranda France, TLS

A golden apple has to go to the extraordinary Too Much of Life: Complete chronicles by Clarice Lispector ... a collection of newspaper columns, bursting with lapidary wisdom and hallucinatory, voluptuous imagery

Keith Miller, TLS Books of the Year

Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts ... vast, playful and volcanic

Carlos Valladares, Gagosian Quarterly