From the massive treasure house of her hugely successful Complete Stories, gathered here are the most glittering gems of Clarice Lispectors short fiction

This radiant selection of Clarice Lispectors best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as The Smallest Woman in the World,Love, Family Ties, and The Egg and the Chicken. Lispectors luminous regard for lifes small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story:

Joy would always be covert for me Sometimes Id 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