, Fragments of Stars. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2021. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2021/12/01/fragments-of-stars/. Acesso em: 07 January 2026.
The writer Ana Maria Machado had an unusual and emotional episode with Clarice Lispector. This happened in 1975. After having read an article by Ana Maria, published that very day in the Jornal do Brasil, about the birthday of the writer Roland Barthes, Clarice, who did not know her personally, insistently asked her for help to organize what in two years would be the book The Hour of the Star. At the end of the day, after some tension-filled twists and turns, the young Ana Maria went to visit the admired Clarice Lispector, of whom she was a fan. She returned home stunned by the encounter and wrote, in the heat of the moment, the draft of a text that would be kept for more than 40 years. The text was finally published in 2020, with minor changes, in Serrote magazine. In this video, produced by the IMS Literature Coordinator’s Office, the story of this encounter – and its outcome – is told by Ana Maria Machado herself, who reconstructs that “strange” day and makes emotional comments about the meeting between the two. Finally, she visits the Clarice Lispector collection, held by the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS), and reviews the manuscripts of The Hour of the Star, the same ones that decades earlier Clarice herself had shown her, scattered in a box, in supplication.
Ana Maria Machado recounts her emotional encounter with Clarice Lispector in 1975.
Academic studies on Clarice Lispector continue to be developed at foreign universities. In 2017, a wide-ranging seminar about the author was held at the University of Oxford.
The word “unfamiliar” is used by Clarice Lispector in several of her works. To be precise, in the original Portuguese, Clarice employed the neologism infamiliar, which is not in the dictionary, though it cannot be affirmed that the author is the source of this term in Brazilian literature. Nonetheless, by mentioning the word “unfamiliar” at least sixteen times, whether in novels, short stories, or chronicles, the author makes this unique signifier an object of greater attention.
Ulysses was Clarice Lispector’s last dog, a mongrel who stole cigarette butts and queued for Coca-Cola and whiskey for visitors. He was so eccentric that he earned a robust note in the infamous periodical O Pasquim.
Darkness is a hollow word and one never really knows what fits inside Its dimensions are so undetermined that perhaps it could even be said that everything fits and nothing fits in it, since, being an immense storehouse of paradoxes, the ambiguous quality of immeasurable is immediately added to the primordial void that characterizes it. These attributes, thus agreed, gain particular density when prepared by the wrought of the author of The Apple in the Dark.
