Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
Machado de Assis
Liveright
<p>"Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881?" –Parul Sehgal, New York Times</p>Machado de Assis's classic novel, the precursor of Latin American fiction, is finally rendered as a stunningly relevant work for twenty-first-century readers."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 Machado de Assis's Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, told eerily from beyond the grave. First appearing in Brazil in 1881, this remarkably experimental novel was never intended by its author to be a popular "run-of-the-mill-novel."<p>Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves, was not, originally, expecting literary encomiums in his lifetime, especially not for Brás Cubas. And yet, his prodigious...</p>