A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village after giving birth out of wedlock—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France, among farms, vineyards, and wheatfields. Her grandparents’ house is nearby, beyond a hill of white sand overrun by foxes, but she and her mother are not welcome there. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms and houses to do what work there is to be done—pruning vines, husking corn, feeding livestock, making sausages and preserves. When farmers and villagers greet the woman, she says nothing, and keeps walking.Once, she was lighthearted, a lovely girl from one of the best families in the valley; but now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits at the edge of the fields, or in the corners of dark kitchens, yearning for her mother to turn from her work and notice her; longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.  “I wanted to love her every minute of my life, so that she would want me,” Marie thinks. “I followed her everywhere. She would ‘Get out of my hair.’ But me, I wanted to love her, to always be near her.”Crazy Genie, told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice—first as a child and later as hopeful, emotionally wounded young woman—is the second novel by the French author Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation, color and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1977. Her first novel, Free Day, won the Prix Roger Nimier in 1973. Together these books cement Cagnati’s astonishing power as a writer to convey the experience of people literature has overlooked, awakening compassion and giving a voice to the voiceless.

Near to the Wild Heart is Clarice Lispector's first novel, written from March to November 1942 and published around her twenty-third birthday. The novel, written in a stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of the English-language Modernists, centers around the childhood and early adulthood of a character named Joana, who bears strong resemblance to her author: "Madame Bovary, c'est moi", Lispector said, quoting Flaubert, when asked about the similarities. The book, particularly its revolutionary language, brought its young, unknown creator to great prominence in Brazilian letters and earned her the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize. Joana, a young woman very much in the mode of existential contemporaries like Camus and Sartre, ponders the meaning of life, the freedom to be one's self, and the purpose of existence. Near to the Wild Heart does not have a conventional narrative plot. It instead recounts flashes from the life of Joana, between her present, as a young woman, and her early childhood. These focus, like most of Lispector's works, on interior, emotional states of mind.

A young girl clings fiercely to the damaged love of her mother—a taciturn farmworker cast out by her family and scorned by her village after giving birth out of wedlock—in this devastating and lyrically rendered novel from a French-Italian maverick.Marie lives with her mother, Genie, in a ramshackle house by a willow-lined river in rural France, among farms, vineyards, and wheatfields. Her grandparents’ house is nearby, beyond a hill of white sand overrun by foxes, but she and her mother are not welcome there. Every morning, Genie walks to the neighboring farms and houses to do what work there is to be done—pruning vines, husking corn, feeding livestock, making sausages and preserves. When farmers and villagers greet the woman, she says nothing, and keeps walking.Once, she was lighthearted, a lovely girl from one of the best families in the valley; but now they all call her “Crazy Genie.” While her mother works, Marie waits at the edge of the fields, or in the corners of dark kitchens, yearning for her mother to turn from her work and notice her; longing for the moment when they will be back in their lonely house by the river.  “I wanted to love her every minute of my life, so that she would want me,” Marie thinks. “I followed her everywhere. She would ‘Get out of my hair.’ But me, I wanted to love her, to always be near her.”Crazy Genie, told in Marie’s ingenuous, straightforward voice—first as a child and later as hopeful, emotionally wounded young woman—is the second novel by the French author Inès Cagnati, who grew up in poverty in rural France in the 1940s, the child of Italian immigrant agricultural workers. Rich in observation, color and detail, and devastating in its portrayal of a child’s unconditional love and of society’s callous prejudices, Crazy Genie won the Prix des Deux Magots in 1977. Her first novel, Free Day, won the Prix Roger Nimier in 1973. Together these books cement Cagnati’s astonishing power as a writer to convey the experience of people literature has overlooked, awakening compassion and giving a voice to the voiceless.