![]() Susan Sontag wrote an essay hailing him as the greatest writer to emerge out of Latin America. Even Jorge Luis Borges, another genius from Latin America with a reputation for his expansive reading, never mentions Machado de Assis. His eminent stature in Brazilian literature makes it all the more surprising that he is virtually unknown in the rest of the Americas. His statue adorns the entrance to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which he founded in 1897. ![]() Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is hugely popular in Brazil. When first published in 1881, the book breathed new life into Brazilian literature. One of his most celebrated works, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is being rejuvenated this summer with a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. ![]() ![]() His books not only feel evergreen, but they also seem to anticipate the taste of a reader from a century and a half later. Machado de Assis’s books, however, are not like that. When you pick up a book from the late nineteenth century, you might prepare yourself to read a musty language that has aged so much it feels otherworldly. ![]()
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