"One of the wittiest, most playful, and . . . most alive and ageless
books ever written." --Dave Eggers, The New Yorker
A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of
one of the greatest Black authors in the Americas
A Penguin Classic
The mixed-race grandson of ex-slaves, Machado de Assis is not only
Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature, who
has been championed by the likes of Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Allen
Ginsberg, John Updike, and Salman Rushdie. In his masterpiece, the 1881
novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (translated also as
Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable
aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms
gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and halfhearted
political ambitions, serves up harebrained philosophies, and complains
with gusto from the depths of his grave. Wildly imaginative, wickedly
witty, and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to the work of
everyone from Cervantes to Sterne to Joyce to Nabokov to Borges to
Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.
This new English translation is the first to include extensive notes
providing crucial historical and cultural context. Unlike other
editions, it also preserves Machado's original chapter breaks--each of
the novel's 160 short chapters begins on a new page--and includes
excerpts from previous versions of the novel never before published in
English.
For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher
of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than
2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best
works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers
trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by
introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary
authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning
translators.
