Benjamin Moser
Benjamin Moser is a writer, editor, critic, and translator who was born in Houston in 1976 and lives in the Netherlands. After attending high school in Texas and France, he graduated from Brown University with a degree in History. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Utrecht.
He worked at Foreign Affairs magazine and Alfred A. Knopf in New York before becoming an editor at the Harvill Press in London. He was the New Books columnist for Harper's Magazine before becoming a Contributing Editor on visual art and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in many publications in the United States and abroad, including Condé Nast Traveler, Newsweek, and The American Scholar.
His first book, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, was published by Oxford University Press (USA), Haus Publishing (UK), Cosac Naify (Brazil), and Civilização (Portugal). Editions are forthcoming in France and Germany. He is the Series Editor of the new retranslations of Clarice Lispector to be published in the United States by New Directions and in the United Kingdom by Penguin Modern Classics.
“There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.”
“Vocation is different from talent. One can have vocation and not have talent; one can be called and not know how to go.”
“A little girl's fantasies are one thing, and literature is another; just as numbers require rules to give them human meaning, words, too, demand a form to turn them into literature.”
“I studied mathematics which is the madness of reason.”
“Clarice scrawled, 'A question from when I was a little girl that I can answer only now: are rocks made, or are they born? Answer: rocks are.”