Many of Clarice Lispector’s readers are unaware that she started out as a journalist, in the early 1940s, before publishing a début novel that astonished the critics and proceeding to become Brazil’s best-known and loved, and most-translated woman writer. In the late 1960s she was invited to conduct a series of interviews for the glossy weekly magazine Manchete. She put her own twist on the interview format, just as she did in every genre in which she worked. The editors let her write about people she knew (or wanted to know) from the worlds of the arts, science, sports, music and literature, but she was also required to engage with less exciting prospects, such as politicians and – even worse, for Lispector – politicians’ wives. Most of her interviews were not simple Q&As, but rather proper conversations, with input from both participants. She challenged them with philosophical questions like ‘what is love?’ or, ‘do you like living dangerously, like me?’ In some of the encounters, though, Lispector’s dislike for her subject is clear from her short, sarcastic comments.’

The book brings together 83 interviews, 35 for the first time since they came out in the press. Prof Williams has been working on the interviews since she came across them in the archives in Rio de Janeiro in 1996. They are neither literature nor literary, unlike Lispector’s highly celebrated fiction and newspaper articles. Still the interviews provide biographical information about her and her subjects, and outline a ‘Who’s Who’ of celebrity culture in Rio in the 1960s. Although they were big names at the time the interviews were first published, many of the interviewees are unknown today outside Brazil. Nevertheless, international audiences may have heard of the musicians Tom Jobim and Vinícius de Morais, the conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky, the authors Nélida Piñón and Jorge Amado and the football coaches Zagallo and João Saldanha.