Covert Joy is an electric volume starring such landmark Clarice Lispector stories as "The Smallest Woman in the World," "Love," "Family Ties," and "The Egg and the Chicken."  As expressed in the title story, Covert Joy offers all the bliss that only a great book can bring: Joy would always be covert for me. . . Sometimes I'd sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.