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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-siecle Rio de Janeiro--a world populated with dissolute plutocrats, grasping parvenus, and struggling spinsters. In this original paperback, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, "the accomplished duo" (Wall Street Journal) behind the "landmark . . . heroically translated" volume (The New Yorker) of the Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, include twenty-six chronologically ordered stories from the seven story collections published during Machado's life--featuring all-time favorites such as the celebrated novella "The Alienist"; the tragicomic "parable of bureaucracy, madness, and power" (Los Angeles Review of Books), "Midnight Mass"; "The Cane"; and "Father Against Mother." Ultimately, Machado de Assis: 26 Stories affirms Machado's status as a literary giant who must finally be fully integrated into the world literary canon.