, 40 Years of The Hour of the Star. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2017. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2017/02/15/40-anos-de-a-hora-da-estrela/. Acesso em: 13 December 2025.
One of Clarice Lispector’s most translated books, The Hour of the Star was published almost 40 years ago by the José Olympio publishing house in October of 1977.
The Rocco publishing house, which as of 1998 assumed the republication of Clarice’s works, is preparing a special volume to celebrate the occasion. Expected to arrive in bookstores in May, the hardcover publication will include six essays written by scholars of the author, among them Nádia Gotlib, Eduardo Portella, Colm Tóibín, Hélène Cixous, and Paloma Vidal.
With a new look, the book will also have an extra section with a facsimile reproduction of the novella’s manuscripts. A part of these manuscripts, in the care of the IMS since 2004, has been scanned and can be accessed here.
Original manuscript of The Hour of the Star / Clarice Lispector Collection / IMS
In addition to the originals for The Hour of the Star, the Clarice Lispector Collection, which is entirely catalogued and available for research in person, is made up of the manuscripts of the novels A Breath of Life and Água Viva, family correspondence, two paintings by the author, LPs, photographs, negatives, and a personal library with around one thousand items, such as books and periodicals.
Last December, Clarice Lispector’s new website, launched on the author’s centenary, on December 10, 2020, earned second place in the Best Digital Design category of the Brasil Design Award.
This August, Todas as crônicas will be released, a volume that brings together for the first time all the chronicles written by Clarice Lispector for newspapers and magazines.
Acclaimed by critics and a popular phenomenon on the internet, Clarice Lispector is considered, internationally, one of the great names in 20th century literature. Mysterious, obscure, revealing, experimental, strangely mystical, or philosophical – how to define the writing of the author of The Hour of the Star? This podcast, conceived and presented by Bruno Cosentino and Eucanaã Ferraz, covers Clarice’s life and work in five episodes, in which they talk to great specialists, professors, and researchers.
In the 2025 edition of Clarice’s Hour, we will celebrate, through the voices and presentations of kids, the children's story “Laura’s Intimate Life,” published as a book by Clarice Lispector in 1974. In this film, six children retell, act, illustrate, and co-direct the story of Laura the hen, her husband Luís, and their son Hermany in Dona Luísa's henhouse.
, Book You Might Not Imagine Clarice Had. IMS Clarice Lispector, 2013. Disponível em: https://site.claricelispector.ims.com.br/en/2013/04/19/livros-que-voce-talvez-nao-imagine-que-clarice-tinha/. Acesso em: 13 December 2025.
When we think about the books that make up a writer’s library, we first imagine works that have influenced the author, or at least dialogue with his or her literary production. When speculating about how Clarice Lispector’s bookshelf would look, a reader could assume the presence of Virginia Woolf’s novels, stories by Katherine Mansfield… and, in fact, in Clarice’s library, which is in the IMS Collection, the two modernists are present.
Unexpected books included various works with Buddhist themes, such as “Introduction to Zen-Buddhism,” “Zen and the Infinite,” and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The author’s interest in eastern philosophy is evident when we handle her copy of the I Ching, “the book of changes,” a Chinese classic that, among other things, also serves as an oracle.
Clarice left various papers with drafts to calculate responses provided by the I Ching. Some of the questions are scribbled, such as “What’s my future in general?” Curiously enough, this question is on a page in her planner dated December 10, 1974, the author’s 54th birthday. It is also hard to imagine Lispector purchasing the nutritional guide Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, by Adelle Davis, or the fitness guide Exercise and Keep Fit, by Terry Hunt.
In addition to these curiosities, we have two books with styles much different from Lispector’s: Stories, by Ernest Hemingway, known for his dry style and faithful to the notion that “to write is to cut words” [as the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond has said] and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, a hilarious novel, written in a simple style defined by the author himself as writing “in the voice of a child.”
Revealing some of the author’s very idiosyncratic interests, we have Fun with Mathematics, by Jerome S. Meyer, and Ten Perfect Crimes, by Hank Sterling, who presents particularly ingenious true crime cases. This latter book is perhaps not so strange considering that it keeps company with many works of detective fiction in Clarice Lispector’s extremely diverse and unusual library.
Starting next May, the shelves of Brazilian bookstores will display copies of A mulher que matou os peixes (The Woman Who Killed the Fish) with a new look.
In 1970, Clarice Lispector started to write a work that would come to be called Água Viva. Published at the end of August 1973 by Artenova, what follows is a manuscript.
More or less fantastic in their plots, these children’s stories reveal narrators who, stripped almost completely of their fictional character, are very similar to the author: they are mothers, writers, they go by the initials “C.L.,” or even say their name is Clarice. Thus, if there is a horizontal posture in these narrators in which respect for the particularities of childhood is presupposed, this same movement also shows the desire to become a little more like a child.
I spent an unforgettable weekend in Cabo Frio, hosted by Scliar who painted two portraits of me. Scliar’s house is very beautiful. Cabo Frio inspires Scliar. I asked him about so much creativity.
