For today’s new episode of Selected Novels—the last of the season!—we talked to Austyn Wohlers about Clarice Lispector’s debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart. “She really freaked me out when I was nineteen,” Austyn recalls of Lispector, who published three novels while still in her twenties—not just for her precocity but for her profound experimentation, which changed Austyn’s sense of what a novel could do. Already in the debut we can see what will motivates Lispector throughout her career, Austyn observes: her “relentless searching for this way of attaining abstract, surreal, transcendental, sublime feeling.” We discuss what makes this search so thrilling, how it shaped Austyn’s understanding of how fiction can capture bodily sensation and perception, and why she had to sneak away into the woods to read the novel semi-illicitly.
Click here to listen to the episode, available on all major streaming platforms, and subscribe to keep up with new episodes—we’ll be back in 2026 with Season Two.
Plus, a programming reminder: the podcast is now hosted on The Point’s Substack. Alongside Apple Podcasts and Spotify, you can now find the full archive of Selected Novels and Selected Essays (as well as a few other one-off episodes) here.
Have questions, comments or essay suggestions for us? Send an email to selectednovels@thepointmag.com—we’d love to hear from you.
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