Covert Joy: Selected Stories

Covert Joy presents Lispector at her most luminous, offering readers a selection of her best-loved stories, including “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Known for her extraordinary ability to illuminate life’s smallest, most revelatory moments, Lispector’s genius here is concentrated in a sparkling, portable volume that captivates from the first page.

In the title story, she captures the private, almost forbidden pleasure that reading can bring:

“Joy would always be covert for me… Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.”

With wit, intensity, and profound emotional insight, Covert Joy offers a dazzling introduction—or return—to Lispector’s short fiction, where every story pulses with the extraordinary hidden within the ordinary.