Collected Works

The collected works of Machado de Assis — most notably Dom Casmurro and The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas — represent the achievement of the greatest Latin American novelist before the Boom generation, a writer who was astonishingly postmodern before postmodernism existed. Often called the "Brazilian Shakespeare," Machado de Assis employed unreliable narration, metafictional self-awareness, and darkly ironic humor decades before these techniques became hallmarks of twentieth-century experimental fiction.

Writing in Brazil during the transition from Empire to Republic, Machado de Assis explored themes of slavery, social climbing, and self-deception with a sophistication that anticipated stream-of-consciousness narration and the unreliable narrator techniques later associated with modernism. His works constitute the foundation of Brazilian literature and have gained increasing international recognition as one of the most remarkable bodies of fiction produced in the nineteenth century.