Accompanied by a thorough introduction to Brazils Machado, Machados Brazil, these vibrant new translations of eight of Machado de Assiss best-known short stories bring Nineteenth-Century Brazilian society and culture to life for modern readers.

Accompanied by a thorough introduction to Brazil's Machado, Machado's Brazil, these vibrant new translations of eight of Machado de Assis's best-known short stories bring nineteenth-century Brazilian society and culture to life for modern readers.

Accompanied by a thorough introduction to Brazil's Machado, Machado's Brazil, these vibrant new translations of eight of Machado de Assis's best-known short stories bring nineteenth-century Brazilian society and culture to life for modern readers.

The experience of thinking about, preparing, or writing a text, be it a book review, or about an art exhibition, cannot be limited solely to the artistic experience. There must always be another kind of challenge. I want that elusive thing that I found, together with the encounter that I had with the "object" and the experience we lived together. Every day when I wake up, I don't think about writing, but I wonder whether I'll be able to rise to the calling of that particular "object" (a book, a painting, a play, opera, etc.). The "characters" in them are never marginal figures. I know that they exist but I do not know them, I do not confront myself with them, or I only do so in highly stereotypical situations where they almost become invisible. When I write about something, this is my attempt at turning the invisible into the visible.

A lively and accessible introduction to Machado de Assis and his work

"One of the wittiest, most playful, and . . . most alive and ageless books ever written." --Dave Eggers, The New Yorker A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas A Penguin Classic The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and halfhearted political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world. This new English translation is the first to include extensive notes providing crucial historical and cultural context. Unlike other editions, it also preserves Machado's original chapter breaks--each of the novel's 160 short chapters begins on a new page--and includes excerpts from previous versions of the novel never before published in English.

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil's greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell's seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he's funny as hell.”