The collected stories of Machado de Assis

About this book

Widely acclaimed as the progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Machado de Assis (1839-1908)--the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves--was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963 and still lacks proper recognition today. Drawn to the master's psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siecle Rio de Janeiro, a world populated with dissolute plutocrats, grasping parvenus, and struggling spinsters, acclaimed translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have now combined Machado's seven short-story collections into one volume, featuring seventy-six stories, a dozen appearing in English for the first time. Born in the outskirts of Rio, Machado displayed a precocious interest in books and languages and, despite his impoverished background, miraculously became a well-known intellectual figure in Brazil's capital by his early twenties. His daring narrative techniques and coolly ironic voice resemble those of Thomas Hardy and Henry James, but more than either of these writers, Machado engages in an open playfulness with his reader--as when his narrator toys with readers' expectations of what makes a female heroine in "Miss Dollar," or questions the sincerity of a slave's concern for his dying master in "The Tale of the Cabriolet." Predo

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Machado de Assis Reading Order: Where to Start

Intermediate10books51 hrs4 stages

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