A Musical Hell

The devastating final work by Brazil’s greatest modern writer, The Hour of the Star tells the haunting tale of Macabéa—a typist who lives in the slums of Rio—underfed, sickly, and unloved, yet inwardly free.

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser. With a contribution by Paulo Gurgel and Valente Colm Tóibín.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Midwinter Day, as Alice Notley noted, is an epic poem about a daily routine. A poem in six parts, Midwinter Day takes us from awakening and emerging from dreams through the whole day-morning, afternoon, evening, night-to dreams again:...

a plain introduction to modes of love and reason/ Then to end I guess with love, a method to this winter season/ Now I've said this love it's all I can remember/ Of Midwinter Day the twenty-second of December// Welcome sun, at last with thy softer light/ That takes the bite from winter weather/ And weaves the random cloth of life together/ And drives away the long black night!

Yoko Tawada's first essay collection in English presents and electrifying new side of the National Book Award-winner as she dives deep into her lifelong fascination with cross-hybridizing languages. The accent here, as in her fiction, is on the art of drawing closer to the world through defamiliarization. Tawada famously writes in both Japanese and German, but her interest in language reached beyond any mere dichotomy. 

The term "exophonic," which she first heard in Senegal, has a special allure for the author: "I was already familiar with similar terms. 'immigrant literature,' or 'creole literature,' but 'exophonic' had a much broader meaning, referring to the general experience of existing outside of one's mother tongue." Exophony opens a new vista into Yoko Tawada's world and delivers more of her signature erudite wit—at once cross-grained and generous, laser-focused and multidimensional, slyly ironic and warmly companionable.

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025. Translated from Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda.

Known as a remarkable classicist, Anne Carson weaves contemporary and ancient poetic strands with stunning style in Glass, Irony and God. This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Bronte sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

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.

Clarice Lispector (December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Brazilian writer acclaimed internationally for her innovative novels and short stories. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War. 

Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it uses the poetry of the fragment and the language of everyday survival to gesture towards the fallibility of language at the juncture of the multiple, intersecting wars on women, on "terror," on the non-White body, and on people and language in diaspora. Drawn from a set of journals written over a four-month period, A book with a hole in it throws the formal, official work of poetry into relief, asking what knowledge exists beyond knowledge, which silences are too deep to be surfaced on the page, and how to pierce through trauma and violence to approach a politics of redemption.

William Rowe, the poet, and eminent translator of Latin American poetry from Vallejo to Raul Zurita & others presents his latest book of poems, Sixfingersafterwards, in six sections. The title word ‘afterwards’, which refers to a large part of the first section of poems takes inspiration from an Ayahuasca session. According to Freud, Afterwardness or Nachtraglichkeit as originally harmless memory can later be re-experienced as traumatic through the lens of new mature understanding. The Marxists view the capitalist state as inherently connected to a ‘death culture’ where the pursuit of profit overrides the human life, turning the system into a form of a vampirism that consumes the living labour. All the sections are written with a deep commitment, elaborating a painful truth in a remarkable open poetic sensitivity. Our language ravaged by ‘vampirism’ where ‘Language itself seemed to form death communiques.’  Other sections are about love, ‘when my daughter says she loves me very much.’  Or a section of Quechua poems translated by Rowe, which shed light on the extensive range of his writing and interconnectedness of his creativity. The poems in this collection leave nothing out of the traumatic pain from capitalism nor its ‘dark dark shine of money.

I dreamt of Rowe, reading these poems to the track called Walking on the ceiling, by the late Chicago blues guitarist, who played with six fingers. I renamed it to Walking the ceiling toward eternity, to honour the Sixfingersafterwards. A must-read!
- Ulli Freer

Alice Notley has consistently peopled her poetry with the voices of those around her: kids, friends, husbands, strangers, and the dead. Thirty-Odd Functions of Voice in the Poetry of Alice Notley offers an array of interpretations of this technique. While not aspiring to completeness, and limiting its attention to one formal aspect of a single author's work, this poem-essay sketches relationships between intimate speech and literary language.

First published in 1999 in an edition of 300 perfectbound copies and 26 spiralbound copies lettered A-Z and signed, Pillage Laud is a lost cult item that now returns to print. As the 1999 edition announced, Pillage Laud selects from pages of computer-generated sentences to produce lesbian sex poems (cauterizations, vocabularies, cantigas, topiary and prose) by pulling through certain found vocabularies, relying on context: boy plug vagina library fate tool doctrine bath discipline belt beds pioneer book ambition finger fist flow. 

It used MacProse, a freeware designed by American poet and jazz musician Charles O. Hartman as a generator of random sentences based on syntax and lexicon instructions internal to the program; the program worked on Apple systems prior to OSX and is now in the dustbins of computer history. In 1999, the news was shocking: Moure’s poems are written by a computer. In 2011, now that everyone is a computer, the book can be read anew.

Picture a pencil curved, implausibly, parabolically. An implement bending back on itself (core straining) so as to be drawing the surest line, even as its eraser-end is simultaneously rubbing that graphite out. What remains almost never was: mark as memorial to foreclosure. Examined from a certain angle, the un-line flickers in and out of thereness. On registration, it lives, it goes forth. Sub rosa, it knows never to clear its throat. It has learnt to calibrate its signature; it can evade infra-red. Propelling itself through the narrowest channels, it proceeds with resolve, flayingly. Mattar’s And most of all I would miss the shadows of the tree’s own leaves cast upon its trunk by the orange streetlight in the sweet blue darks of spring is taut as writing can be. The tone she makes sound is singular and desperately (gloriously) intent.
- Sarah Hayden

Piercing and lucid in its exposition of atmospheric violence and total erasure, Mira Mattar gets to the grain of how the languages of selfhood, mediated but also inhibited by the force of the ‘un-universal’, become complicit in forming the sovereign imperative to self-determination, ‘oh arrogant ambition / to transform / you & keep myself / plumed’, through the reproduction of a ‘contested field / of meaning’, one both marked by the lure and ruse of psychic stability as the real fantasy of occupation, and immanent to concrete, unknown modes of personal resistance and collective recovery thread like a ‘rope / in a knot in a line / of knots’, an inherited ‘excess of memory / mostly portal.’ Mattar carefully gleans in its undecidability, given over to moments of precarious decision without ties or duplicity.
- James Goodwin