Collected Stories of Machado de Assis

By: Machado De Assis, Margaret Jull Costa - translator, Robin Patterson - translator

Narrated by: Lincoln Hoppe

A landmark event, the complete stories of Machado de Assis finally appear in English for the first time in this extraordinary new translation.

Widely acclaimed as a progenitor of 20th-century Latin American fiction, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963, and still lacks proper recognition today.

Aware of this lacuna and drawn to the master's psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siecle Rio de Janeiro—a world populated with down-and-out aristocrats, parvenus, and struggling spinsters—Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have combined all seven of Machado's short-story collections appearing in his lifetime into one volume featuring 76 stories, a dozen appearing in English for the first time. Machado's daring narrative techniques and postcolonial realism anticipated the dominant themes of 20th century literature and this majestic translation reintroduces him as a literary giant who must finally be integrated into the world literary canon.

©2018 Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (P)2019 Recorded Books

Low effort to properly translate such a great work

It can be quite distracting throughout the recording to hear proper names of people and places and things mispronounced for lack of knowledge of the original language in which they are written.

This is not The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis

This is a selection from The Collected Stories, which means it’s an abridgment of the book it claims to be a reading of. So it’s not as advertised.

The reading is only fair to middling.

Machado’s stories are sublime.