Lauren Groff on Masters of Short Fiction

"Lispector was born in Ukraine in 1920. Her family fled the pogroms when she was a baby, eventually settling in Brazil. As an adult, she moved around a lot because her husband was a diplomat. And I think she's a genius. There's just nobody who writes like her. Her writing plays according to very strong internal rules-the aesthetic is really regulated and, in many ways, sui generis. I just love her so much."

"Lispector wrote a lot about women. Many of her stories are about the internal space within women's psyches, and the way that they encounter the world as they go about their lives. She wrote about the world as we know it, but in such a slantwise way that it becomes surreal. They convey her vision of the world, which was extraordinarily strange."

Lauren Groff is known for the novel Fates and Furies and has built a devoted audience through short stories that confront grief, parenthood, violence toward women, and questions of safety. Her stories explore how imagined futures shape lived reality. Her collection Brawler is forthcoming. Groff highlights Clarice Lispector, whose prose follows stringent internal rules and a sui generis aesthetic, centering women's interior psyches and offering a surreal, outsider perspective. Groff also cites Yoko Ogawa, whose three novellas are surreal, deeply disturbing, verge on horror, and examine the nature of evil.

Read at The New Yorker