Joaquim Machado De Assis: 55 books

Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis was the finest storyteller of nineteenth-century Latin America. "Midnight Mass and Other Stories" offers a selection of Machado's tales, from the oft-translated and sly erotic title story, a classic of Brazilian literature, to such brief ironic tales,...

Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man" writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. But while he may be dead he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature Brazil's greatest...

Chekhov noted that if, early in a story, mention was made of a rifle hanging on the wall, it would eventually have to go off. Hanging on the window frame of the schoolhouse in Machado de Assis's "A School Story" is not a rifle, but a paddle, complete with five holes drilled in it. Genre:...

Esau and Jacob is the last of Machado de Assis's four great novels. At one level it is the story of twin brothers in love with the same woman and her inability to choose between them. At another level, it is the story of Brazil itself, caught between the traditional and the modern, and between the...

Like other great nineteenth century novels--The Scarlet Letter, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary--Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro explores the themes of marriage and adultery. But what distinguishes Machado's novel and what makes it such a delightful discovery for English-speaking readers, is its eccentric...

In "Trio in A Minor," Machado's classic tale of a love triangle in Brazilian high society, the intrigue plays out to the tune of the old sonata of the absolute. Brazil's Machado de Assis, the greatest Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century (1839-1908), also excelled...

Inácio Ramos is a cellist. His young wife, daughter of a poor shopkeeper, does not understand his art. She is drawn instead to popular music and those who play it, above all to a mediocre law student who is back in Rio de Janeiro for the holidays. Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest...

Failed composer Maestro Romão, ill, is seeking desperately to complete a piece of music he had abandoned in 1779, shortly after his marriage. In this brief and moving tale by the Brazilian master Machado de Assis, one of his finest, the frustrated artist Romão struggles momentarily against the oblivion...

The disquieting pleasures of a forty-year-old man are gradually made clear to a young doctor in this short story by the great Brazilian Machado de Assis. Length: 4,000 words. Date of English translation: 2012.

Young José Martins, let out of class early one day, heads home with his uncle and his older sister. On the way, he and his sister try to guess the reason--a party? a birthday? an election victory?--for their unexpected dismissal from class. Genre: short story Length: 3,000 words Translated...

"Our disagreement has a natural explanation. I am a single girl, full of complications, dreams, ambitions, and poetry; you are already a woman of the house, a calm and happy wife, soon to be a mother; you see things through a different lens." Raquel and her married friend Luísa exchange...

"Her gaze was not absent, as it had been shortly before; instead, it was fixed on the flowers on the wallpaper that lined the room. She noticed, for the first time, that the flowers were daisies. And she shifted her gaze from one to the next, to see if the pattern was the same, and she found...

It's Christmas Eve, 1861 or 1862. Seventeen-year-old Nogueira, a native of the provinces living in Rio de Janeiro for his studies, has arranged with a neighbor to go to midnight mass. Into the parlor where he is waiting up alone walks Dona Conceição, the thirty-year-old wife of the...

A classified ad is offering a large reward for the return of a lost greyhound. Mendonça, a single young doctor who has found the dog, makes his way to a house on Rua de Mata-cavalos, where the reward he ultimately collects is much different from the monetary one mentioned in the classifieds.Translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Juan LePuenGenre: short storyLength: 9,000 words