Lispector's 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." Lispector's luminous regard for life's 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 I'd 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