Machado de Assis is one of the most enigmatic and fascinating story writers who ever lived. What seem at first to be stately social satires reveal unanticipated depths through hints of darkness and winking surrealism. This new selection of his finest work, translated by the prize-winning Daniel Hahn, showcases the many facets of his mercurial genius. A brilliant scientist opens the first asylum in his home town, only to start finding signs of insanity all around him. A young lieutenant basks in praise of his new position, but in solitude feels his identity fray into nothing. The reading of a much-loved, respected elder statesman's journals reveals hidden thoughts of merciless cruelty.

"I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas-at the end of the narrator's life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis' definitive work-a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel". Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Bras Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Bras Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.

"I passed away at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas-at the end of the narrator's life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis' definitive work-a fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel". Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machado's career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Bras Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Bras Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.

'I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing'. So begins the posthumous memoir of Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian. While the grave may have given Cubas the distance to examine his rather undistinguished life, it has certainly not dampened his sense of humour. Epitaph of a Small Winner is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history.

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (also translated 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 half-hearted political ambitions, serves up hare-brained 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 works by Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson’s critically acclaimed translations of Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis introduced a new generation of readers to one of Brazil’s most ground-breaking authors. Hailed as “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America� (Susan Sontag), Machado’s genius is on full display in this fresh translation of the 1899 classic Dom Casmurro. In his supposed memoir, Bento Santiago, an engaging yet unreliable narrator, suspects his wife, Capitu, of having an affair with his closest friend. Withdrawn and obsessive, our antihero mines the origins of their love story: from childhood neighbours playing innocently in the backyard to his brief spell in a seminary to marriage and the birth of their child—whom, he fears, does not resemble him. A gripping domestic drama brimming with Machado’s signature humour, this is another stunningly modern tale from the progenitor of twentieth-century fiction.

In these memoirs, Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian, examines (from beyond the grave) his rather undistinguished life in 160 short chapters that are filled with philosophical digressions and exuberant insights. A clear forerunner of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, "Epitaph for a Small Winner," first published in 1880, is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history as well as "one of the masterpieces of Brazilian literature" (Salman Rushdie).

This is a fictional memoir by the nineteenth-century Brazilian writer whom Philip Roth has described as 'a great ironist, a tragic comedian'. "Dom Casmurro" is the story of Bento Santiago, an affluent citizen of Rio who comes to believe in his old age that his beloved wife, Capitu, betrayed him with his best friend for many years. In telling the sometimes sad, sometimes raucous tale of his love for and loss, through jealousy, of Capitu, he reconstructs - and sometimes wildly reimagines - the past in order to make the present more bearable.

A progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. This majestic translation combines all his short-story collections appearing in his lifetime and reintroduces de Assis as a literary giant who must be integrated into the world literary canon.

Bentinho Santiago, cosseted only child of a rich widow, lives next door to Capitu, the daughter of a lowly government official. As childhood friendship turns to adolescent love, an obstacle to the union exists in the form of a vow made by Bentinho s mother before his birth: her son is to be a priest. The lovers situation appears hopeless, but resourceful Capitu is not easily discouraged. De Assis weaves a powerful and ultimately tragic story of love and disillusionment, full of the subtle irony that is the hallmark of his writing. In Capitu, his enigmatic heroine, he has also created one of the most fascinating characters in Brazilian fiction."

Acclaimed as "the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America" by Susan Sontag, as well as "another Kafka" by Allen Ginsberg, Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was famous in his time for his psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siecle Rio de Janeiro. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, "the accomplished duo" (The Wall Street Journal) behind the "landmark...heroically translated" volume (The New Yorker) of The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis (ISBN 978 0 87140 496 1), include twenty-six chronologically ordered stories, Machado de Assis affirms Machado's status as a literary giant who must finally be fully integrated into the world literary canon.