The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis - Hardcover

“The Collected Stories reveals the arc of Machado’s career, from the straightforward love stories to the cerebral and unpredictable later works.... Machado’s stories pulse with life.... To Machado, your identity and the contours of your world are formed not just by your circumstances but by what you think about habitually. You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely. These stories are a spectacular place to start.”
- Parul Sehgal, New York Times

“For the first time, the short stories of this 19th-century Brazilian master have been collected and translated into English, allowing the reader to trace the arc of Machado’s career, from the straightforward early love stories to the postmodern later works. Certain preoccupations persist: alluring widows, naive young men, a fondness for coincidence. Above all looms the figure of the bibliomane. 'This is my family,' one says, pointing to his bookshelf. Like his characters, Machado was a creature of literature; ink ran in his veins. It is breathtaking to see the development of his style as well as his deep engagement with storytelling all over the world.”
- New York Times, "Times Critics' Top Books of 2018"

“Perhaps the most hopeful book to appear in 2018 is The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis.... an enormous, gorgeously designed story omnibus from the eternal optimists at Liveright Publishing.... Given a fresh translation by the accomplished duo of Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, these 76 stories move among a bewildering range of traditions.... [A] watershed collection.”
- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A landmark volume that will be the first place that most Americans encounter [De Assis].... The Collected Stories, nearly a thousand pages long, captures the greatest range of his writing that has ever existed in a single English volume. Heroically translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, the book gathers almost four decades of work, from 1870 to 1906. Machado de Assis is light and fun in a way one seldom expects of authors who end up as statues.... Machado is proof that cosmopolitanism comes from reading, not from travel: through books, he knew the whole world.”
- Benjamin Moser, The New Yorker

“A welcome omnibus edition of short fiction by the writer widely considered the greatest to have come out of Brazil.... Sometimes Machado de Assis reads like a European modernist (‘On that day―sometime around 2222, I imagine―the paradox will take off its wings and put on the thick coat of common truth’), at others like the contemporary of Melville and Flaubert that he was (‘I succumbed to the morbid pleasure of tormenting myself, for no good reason’). In whatever regard, this collection offers plenty of evidence for why he enjoys the reputation he does, a pioneer of moods and modes that include fables, thin satires, and even gothic romances. Essential to students of Latin American and world literature.”
- Kirkus Reviews [Starred Review]

“A great ironist, a tragic comedian. . . . In his books, in their most comic moments, he underlines the suffering by making us laugh.”
- Philip Roth

“Another Kafka.”
- Allen Ginsberg

“The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America.”
- Susan Sontag

“The supreme black literary artist to date.”
- Harold Bloom

“A major literary event... One of the pleasures of reading Machado is to encounter this comedy of detail, of human particulars... There is a worldly hunger in Machado’s writing, an openness to both life and art.... For Machado, literature begets more literature. He delights in playing with form and narrative; in this volume there are stories written as lectures, stories written entirely in dialogue, and stories in which literary theory itself is mocked.”
- Morten Hoi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books