‘The Hen’ by Clarice Lispector, translated by Elizabeth Bishop

While you’re there you might as well read ‘The Smallest Woman in the World’ too. In both stories, Lispector writes female figures who become the instrument of a turn against narrative – as though to be female were to overturn the rules of form.

First published in The Kenyon Review, 1964. Collected in The Complete Stories, New Directions/Penguin Modern Classics, 2015. Read it online here