Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, one of the greatest novels written in Portuguese, is a celebration of language and a revolutionary work that shattered all of the literary conventions of its time. The reader is mistreated, with chapters left blank and others deemed useless. Brás Cubas, the unlikely hero of this story, did nothing special in life. He fell in love with a married woman, failed a political career, never had children, and then he died. After his death, he wrote his memoirs. Since its publication in 1881, it has continued to gain the appreciation and affection of some of the greatest contemporary intellectuals and artists. Woody Allen considered it one of his favorite books, calling it a "very, very original masterpiece." Susan Sontag mentioned that this book always impresses readers with the strength of a personal discovery. Harold Bloom described the book as comic, clever, evasive, and very fun to read, sentence after sentence.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates.

Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid the realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be.

Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator—edge of despair to edge of despair—and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel, she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.