Discusses life, time, beauty, experience, meaning, music, and art.

Lispector at her most philosophically radical.

In Água Viva Clarice Lispector aims to 'capture the present'. Her direct, confessional and unfiltered meditations on everything from life and time to perfume and sleep are strange and hypnotic in their emotional power and have been a huge influence on many artists and writers, including one Brazilian musician who read it one hundred and eleven times. Despite its apparent spontaneity, this is a masterly work of art, which rearranges language and plays in the gaps between reality and fiction.

Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

Roni Horn's remarkable body of work continues to communicate how she imaginatively inhabits the world and combines a careful study of the role of language in perception. Horn's unique ability to engage the viewer with a vivid sense of time and place in her range of sculptures, books, drawings and photographic installations, provide an active pursuit of self-revelation and the transience of form. For Horn's exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London in 2004, the entire floorplan of the main gallery was given over to the installation of Rings of Lispector. Consisting of interconnecting rubber tiles, the work is inlaid with select passages from Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector's book Agua VivaStream of Life). Translated by Hélène Cixous, phrases appear on the floor in circular arrangements, echoing the movement of raindrops on the surface of water. The work embodies a sense of the dialectic between architectural space and poetic force, encouraging one to experience the rubber physically underfoot and to view the words from above. This act of location addresses inner emotions with the idea of landscape.

One of the most phenomenally acclaimed and successful books of recent years is now available as a paperback—with three just-discovered stories Here, gathered in one volume, are the stories that made Clarice a Brazilian legend. Originally a cloth edition of eighty-six stories, now we have eighty- nine in all, covering her whole amazing career, from her teenage years to her deathbed. In these pages, we meet teenagers becoming aware of their sexual and artistic powers, humdrum housewives whose lives are shattered by unexpected epiphanies, old people who don’t know what to do with themselves— and in their stories, Clarice takes us through their lives—and hers—and ours.

&¿ Llevas una vida espiritual saludable? &¿ Qué implica superar las pruebas y tribulaciones de la vida cristiana? &¿ Con qué criterio hemos de medir nuestra rectitud?Estas son solo algunas de las t&í picas preguntas que plantean hoy los libros m&á s populares de ayuda espiritual y vida cristiana. Son preguntas que a menudo conducen a respuestas deficientes que solo causan mayor incertidumbre en los lectores respecto a la fe que se les concede por medio de Cristo crucificado.El Dr. Steven Hein les da un giro a estas preguntas, y ofrece una perspectiva radicalmente distinta sobre c&ó mo es la verdadera vida cristiana. En contra de la opini&ó n popular, el cristianismo no se trata del é xito o los logros, ni deber&í a enfocarse en el Cristo resucitado glorificado. Antes bien, el cristianismo siempre ha estado centrado primordialmente en aquella antigua y cruenta cruz, donde Cristo fue crucificado por ti en su plena humanidad y plena divinidad.