In the final novel by one of the greatest writers in the Americas, an aging diplomat bears witness to the shifting cultural tides of nineteenth-century BrazilJoaquim Maria Machado de Assis has been hailed as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, a progenitor of modernism and a masterful ironist known for his inspired critiques of nineteenth-century Brazil. Memorial de Ayres is his final novel, released just two months before his death in 1908.In...

Our Musseque is a tale of growing up in one of the vibrant shanty towns (musseques) of Luanda during the 1940s and 1950s. Weaving back and forwards through his half-remembered childhood, the narrator draws us into a close-knit world of labourers, shopkeepers, drunks, prostitutes and determined women battling to bring up their families, as Angola hurtles towards the beginning of its armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. Meanwhile the children laugh, play, squabble and fight, puzz...

INTRODUCTION BY MISHA GLENNY**, author of McMafia**A gripping narrative of power, corruption and greed, The Mechanism is the true story of how a simple investigation into money laundering uncovered the biggest corruption scandal in human history.When a small team of investigators discovered that a black market currency dealer was operating out of a Brazilian petrol station, they could never have imagined that their work would destroy the g...

The stories included in this collection are classics of children's literature and have been cherished by generations of Portuguese children. This is the first time these stories have been translated into English. The author is one of Portugal's greatest poets and, like her poetry, these stories are filled with her delight and pleasure in nature, gardens and the sea, as well as her keen sense of the magical. Among other things, we encounter dwarves, diminutive little girls who live on the s...

A masterpiece of realism, Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro probes the mind of a distrustful husband with delusions of grandeur.Originally published in 1899, Dom Casmurro is widely considered to be Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s masterpiece and a progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction. This exuberant new translation captures all the hilarious, maddening, and utterly compelling idiosyncrasies of one of Machado’s most complex charact...

A satirical tale of a young man flush with newfound wealth who promptly gets swindled, Quincas Borba is an inspired critique of nineteenth-century Brazil.Hailed in his lifetime as one of Latin America’s greatest writers, Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was a storyteller known for his wholly innovative narrative techniques and uncanny talent for unraveling the social and political milieu of nineteenth-century Brazil. These signature traits are on full display in Qu...

“Is it possible that the most modern, most startlingly avant-garde novel to appear this year was originally published in 1881?”—Parul Sehgal, New York TimesNow considered a progenitor of South American fiction, Machado de Assis’s highly experimental novel is finally rendered as a stunningly contemporary work. Narrating from beyond the grave, Brás Cubas—an enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable antihero—describes his childhood spent tormenting house...

This “watershed collection” (Wall Street Journal) now appears in an essential selected paperback edition, with twenty-six of Machado’s finest stories.Widely acclaimed as “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” (Susan Sontag), as well as “another Kafka” (Allen Ginsberg), Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was famous in his time for his psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siècle Rio de Janeiro—a world populated with dissolute plutocrats, ...

New York Times Critics’ Best of the YearA 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 the progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Machado de Assis (1839–1908)—the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves—was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil’s greatest writer. His prod...

A TLS Book of the YearThis exhilarating collection of non-fiction sees one of the greatest twentieth-century writers meditating on the moments that make up a life'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?'Between 1967 and 1977, the internationally renowned author Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already...

In the magnificent feast of Clarice Lispector’s books, her crônicas―short, intensely vivid newspaper pieces―are the delicious canapés.“The things I’ve learned from taxi drivers would be enough to fill a book. They know a lot: they really do get around. I may know a lot about Antonioni that they don’t know. Or maybe they do even when they don’t. There are various ways of knowing by not-knowing. I know: it happens to me too.”The crônica, a literary genre pecu...

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Mechanism by Vladimir Netto, read by Robert G. Slade.INTRODUCTION BY MISHA GLENNY**, author of McMafia**A gripping narrative of power, corruption and greed, The Mechanism is the true story of how a simple investigation into money laundering uncovered the biggest corruption scandal in human history.When a small team of investigators discovered that a black ...