The International Library
The International Library and BAM Present Clarice Lispector from Page to Screen
Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT March 11, 2026
The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed
Join us for an evening devoted to the work and life of Clarice Lispector in collaboration with the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and the Center for the Art of Translation.
One of 20th-century literature’s most singular and unsettling voices, Lispector’s writing continues to reverberate across language, cinema, and performance. Bringing together publishers, translators, filmmakers, and actors, this conversation will explore how her radically interior and philosophical prose has inspired new forms of artistic interpretation and why it remains so resonant today.
Filmmaker Luiz Fernando Carvalho and actress Maria Fernanda Cândido, one of the stars of the Oscar-nominated The Secret Agent, will reflect on the creative challenges of translating Lispector’s inner landscapes—her silences, obsessions, and moments of revelation—into visual and performative language. In particular, they’ll discuss their film, The Passion According to G.H., which opens on Friday, March 13th at BAM for a weeklong run.
New Directions Publisher Barbara Epler and renowned translator and biographer Benjamin Moser will join them in considering how Lispector’s work resists categorization, hovering between philosophy, confession, and fiction, and how that resistance has shaped her reception across cultures and generations.
Moderated by critic and curator Carlos Valladares, the evening offers a rich reflection on what it means to read, translate, publish, and adapt a writer whose work continues to unsettle, illuminate, and reimagine the contours of inner life.
This event was curated in collaboration with Jesse Trussell (BAM) and Madeleine Molyneaux (Picture Palace Pictures) and is generously supported by the Consulate General of Brazil in New York and the Instituto Guimarães Rosa.
We offer two in-person ticket options: the $10 Standard Ticket and the $40+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs.
Featuring
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Maria Fernanda Cândido
Maria Fernanda Cândido
Maria Fernanda Cândido is a celebrated Brazilian actress who works across film and theater and divides her time between France and Brazil. Her long standing collaboration with writer/director Luiz Fernando Carvalho includes the television series Capitu and the 2023 feature film The Passion of G.H. based on Clarice Lispector’s novel, for which she was awarded Best Actress honors at FILMADRID, BAFICI and Terra di Siena International Film Festival. She plays Eliza in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Oscar-nominated The Secret Agent (2025). Other film credits include Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor, Hector Babenco’s My Hindu Friend and Fantastic Beasts: the Secrets of Dumbledore. In Paris at the Théâtre du Soleil, she recently starred in and produced Ballade au-dessus de l’abîme, based on the life and work of Lispector.
Photo Credit: Jairo Goldflus
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Luiz Fernando Carvalho
Luiz Fernando Carvalho
Luiz Fernando Carvalho is an award-winning and critically acclaimed Brazilian filmmaker and television director, known for works with a strong relationship with literature and which represent a renewal for the aesthetics of Brazilian audiovisuals. Visual and language experimentation is one of the characteristics of his work, as is his investigation of the multiplicity of Brazil’s cultural identity. Elements of the director’s poetics include the baroque style of overlapping and intersecting narrative genres, the relationship with the instance of Time, the archetypal symbols of the Earth and reflection on the language of social and family melodrama. His radical television work, spanning three decades, is the subject of the 2018 book Reimagining Brazilian Television: Luiz Fernando Carvalho’s Contemporary Vision (Latinx and Latin America Profiles). His first feature narrative, Lavoura Arcaica/To the Left of the Father, based on the novel by Raduan Nassar, was described by Le Figaro as a “moving and desperate work like that of a tropical Pasolini.” Luiz’s most recent work, The Passion of G.H. (2023) based on the novel by Clarice Lispector, had its international premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and was awarded the Grand Prize at BAFICI, special Jury Mention at FILMADRID and Best Film at Terra Di Siena International Film Festival. The film will have its North American premiere in a week long run at BAM March 13-19.
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Barbara Epler
Barbara Epler
Barbara Epler started working at New Directions in 1984, and is now the president and publisher. She has worked on the books of writers such as Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, Muriel Spark, Joseph Roth, Robert Walser, Stevie Smith, John Keene, Yoko Tawada, and Clarice Lispector, and many others. Independent since 1936, New Directions is a for-profit literary press that brings out about 35 new books a year and maintains more than 1,300 titles on its backlist.
Photo Credit: Nina Subin
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Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of 2009. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. Sontag: Her Life and Work won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, and The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters appeared in 2023. He is currently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. His newest book, Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History will appear from Doubleday in September 2026.
Photo Credit: Nan Goldin
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Carlos Valladares
Carlos Valladares
Carlos Valladares is a critic, screenwriter, and curator from Los Angeles. He studied film at Stanford University and began his PhD in History of Art and Film & Media Studies at Yale University in fall 2019. He contributes regularly to Art in America, n+1, and frieze. He is at work on two films, one a political thriller, the other a romantic comedy. He curated the show “John Giorno: No Nostalgia” at the Marciano Foundation in Los Angeles, Fall 2025. He lives in New York.
Photo Credit: Jade Sacker
Featured Book
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The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector
Published by New Directions
Translated by Idra Novey
The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector’s mystical novel of 1964, concerns a well-to-do Rio sculptress, G.H., who enters her maid’s room, sees a cockroach crawling out of the wardrobe, and, panicking, slams the door—crushing the cockroach—and then watches it die. At the end of the novel, at the height of a spiritual crisis, comes the most famous and most genuinely shocking scene in Brazilian literature. Lispector wrote that of all her works this novel was the one that “best corresponded to her demands as a writer.”
About The International Library
The International Library is a collaboration between The Center for Fiction and the Center for the Art of Translation. Join us for a series of conversations across time, place, language, and culture, with live audiences in San Francisco and Brooklyn, with more locations to come. This series will guide readers to think critically about how stories are told and explore the inspiration, philosophy, and craft of international storytellers.
About Our Partners
BAM is the home for curious people and adventurous ideas. We support artistic experimentation and champion inclusion and accessibility throughout the arts as presenter, activator, and connector.
Founded in 2000, the Center for the Art of Translation is a literary nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Our publications, events, and educational programming enrich the library of vital literary works, nurture and promote the work of translators, build audiences for literature in translation, and honor the incredible linguistic and cultural diversity of our schools and our world.
About this series
The International Library
The International Library is a series of conversations across time, place, language, and culture. Presented by The Center for Fiction and the Center for the Art of Translation with live audiences in Brooklyn and San Francisco.
