Plenty of writers inspire fierce devotion in their readers—­the David Foster Wallace acolytes, with their duct-taped copies of Infinite Jest, come to mind, as do the smug objectivists dressed in tech-world casual who owe their entire worldview to Ayn Rand. But no one converts the uninitiated into devout believers as suddenly and as vertiginously as Clarice Lispector, the Latin American visionary, Ukrainian-Jewish mystic, and middle-class housewife and mother so revered by her Brazilian fans that she’s known by a single name: “Clarice.”

Lispector was a figure of glamour and mystery in her lifetime.

The Complete Stories, edited and introduced by Benjamin Moser and translated, with jarring beauty, by Katrina Dodson, continues the introduction of Lispector’s work to the English-speaking world that began with Moser’s 2009 biography Why This World. Lispector was a figure of glamour and mystery in her lifetime, a writer so singular that her fiction often seems without precedent and her biography can sound apocryphal. There is a telling anecdote in the novelist Colm Tóibín’s introduction to her last novel, The Hour of the Star: Around the same time Lispector was working on the book, a younger Brazilian novelist, José Castello, saw her peering into the window of a shop one day on the Avenida Copacabana, in Rio. Castello greeted Lispector, and she turned slowly away from the window to face him. “So it’s you,” she said mysteriously. Castello noticed that the window of the shop was empty except for a number of undressed mannequins. It was a jarring enough encounter that he would write about it later. “Clarice had a passion for the void,” he concluded.

Lispector’s thorny, relentlessly interior fiction—the narrator of her novel The Passion According to G.H. eats a dead cockroach in a maid’s room to try and get closer to God—was long considered too hermetic to translate. But thanks to Moser’s tireless advocacy of her work and the support of independent publisher New Directions in the United States and Penguin Classics in the United Kingdom, she’s now getting the Bolaño treatment—and the global acclaim she has long deserved.

Born in 1920 into the miseries of a Ukrainian shtetl—her mother contracted syphilis after being gang-raped by Russian soldiers before she was born; the family was cheated, starved, and forced to flee successive waves of pogroms before gaining passage in 1922 to Brazil on a steamer—Lispector was a foreigner in the only country she claimed as her own. “I belong to Brazil,” she once declared, but Brazil didn’t always reciprocate. She was entirely unknown to Brazil’s intellectual class when her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, was published to breathless acclaim in 1943. “She felt a perfect animal inside of her,” Lispector wrote of the novel’s protagonist, Joana, a wild child who grows into a hot mess of a religious mystic, “full of contradictions, of selfishness and vitality.” This plotless spectacle of splintered consciousness has more in common with Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) than it does with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the title was cribbed from a passage, and Joana’s declarations are arrestingly surreal: “I will be as brutal and misshapen as a rock.”

Selfish vitality was a constant in Lispector’s own life, carrying her through early fame in literary Rio, where rumors swirled about her identity, to exile on the stultifying diplomatic circuit, where she was forced to play hostess—badly—in order to further her husband’s career. She faced rejection from afar by Brazil’s publishers, battled sleeping-pill and tranquilizer addictions, and was eventually rediscovered, in the 1960s, for the formal abandon of her late novels, as well as her weekly crônicas in the influential newspaper Jornal do Brasil.