Machado de Assis: 26 Stories

Written by Machado De Assis

Narrated by Lincoln Hoppe

A landmark event, the complete stories of Machado de Assis finally appear in English for the first time in this extraordinary new translation. Widely acclaimed as a progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, 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. Aware of this lacuna and drawn to the master's psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siecle Rio de Janeiro-a world populated with down-and-out aristocrats, parvenus, and struggling spinsters-Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have combined all seven of Machado's short-story collections appearing in his lifetime into one volume featuring seventy-six stories, a dozen appearing in English for the first time. Machado's daring narrative techniques and postcolonial realism anticipated the dominant themes of twentieth-century literature and this majestic translation reintroduces him as a literary giant who must finally be integrated into the world literary canon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Translator: Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501999635

Machado De Assis

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro, 21 de junho de 1839 Rio de Janeiro, 29 de setembro de 1908) foi um escritor brasileiro, considerado por muitos críticos, estudiosos, escritores e leitores o maior nome da literatura brasileira.

Reviews for Machado de Assis

[yarb_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There’s no lack of variety in this collection, culled from Machado’s 120-something catalogue of short stories by the translators with the aim of representing, even roughly, a writer who never seems to have settled on a preferred style or voice. Many of these tales are more or less parables, ludic thought experiments sometimes calling to mind Borges — the two outright parables, Life! and The Canon were the only two that did absolutely nothing for me. At the other end of the stylistic spectrum are gentle social satires like Augusta’s Secret that approach someone like, I dunno, Katherine Mansfield, but without her psychological penetration. And in between are short, anecdotal tales, sometimes with hints of the uncanny, that put me in mind of Ambrose Bierce. These include me favourite by far, Maria Cora, about the cruelties and delusions of love, and the moving but heavy-handed Father against Mother, in which a penurious slave-catcher saves his own child at the expense of another. Overall, mostly enjoyable enough, but the comparisons to Sterne, Kafka, Beckett and god knows who else are OTT (though Machado does predate all of them except Sterne). Clearly a very interesting writer, and I’m looking forward to reading his novels.