(Fiction; University of Texas Press, 1972)
Intimations of mortality can arrive at the most mundane moments—as you’re getting ready for a party, while you’re talking with a friend, or when you’re pausing over a sentence in a book. For the men and women in Clarice Lispector’s famous story collection Family Ties, life’s possibilities reveal themselves precisely at moments of eclipse. A sense of perilous ambush results, and how well or poorly the characters fare depends largely on the relationships that bind them to the world outside themselves.
