Book: Machado de Assis: A Literary Life

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Machado de Assis: A Literary Life

K. David Jackson, professor of Portuguese

(Yale University Press)

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer, although his work is little read outside his native country.

In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado in decades, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the 20th century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the life, work, and legacy of the author whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he’s funny as hell.”

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