Machado de Assis

Dom Casmurro é a alcunha de Bento Santiago, que, velho e só, desvela as suas memórias. Uma promessa da mãe, traça-lhe o destino como padre, mas Bento Santiago apaixonado, abandona o seminário. Estuda Direito e casa-se com o seu grande amor, mas o ciúme e a desconfiança adensam-se. Suspeita que não é o pai biológico do filho do casal, Ezequiel, mas sim o seu grande amigo Escobar.

"Be aware that frankness is the prime virtue of a dead man," writes the narrator of The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. But while he may be dead, he is surely one of the liveliest characters in fiction, a product of one of the most remarkable imaginations in all of literature, Brazil's greatest novelist of the nineteenth century, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. By turns flippant and profound, The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas is the story of an unheroic man with half-hearted political ambitions, a harebrained idea for curing the world of melancholy, and a thousand quixotic theories unleashed from beyond the grave. It is a novel that has influenced generations of Latin American writers but remains refreshingly and unforgettably unlike anything written before or after it. Newly translated by Gregory Rabassa and superbly edited by Enylton de Sa Rego and Gilberto Pinheiro Passos, this Library of Latin America edition brings to English-speaking readers a literary delight of the highest order.

A publicação de 'Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas' não só inaugura o Realismo no Brasil, como inicia a etapa mais complexa da obra de Machado de Assis. Com ela, aprofunda-se a sua análise da realidade e refina-se a sua linguagem, sendo considerada a obra que prenuncia algumas técnicas da literatura moderna.

“I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who had died and is now writing.” So begins the posthumous memoir of Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian. Though the grave has given Cubas the distance to examine his rather undistinguished life, it has not dampened his sense of humor. In the tradition of Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shamdy, Epitaph of a Small Winner is one of the wittiest self-portraits in literary history.

A classic work of literature by “the greatest author ever produced in Latin America.” (Susan Sontag) Brilliant physician Simão Bacamarte sacrifices a prestigious career to return home and dedicate himself to the budding field of psychology. Bacamarte opens the first asylum in Brazil hoping to crown himself and his hometown with “imperishable laurels.” But the doctor begins to see signs of insanity in more and more of his neighbors. . .  With dark humor and sparse prose, The Alienist lets the reader ponder who is really crazy.