read machado de assis. like, now: https://pt.zlibrary-jp.se/book/5632569/d16264?signAll=1&ts=1636

"'To love this book,' Susan Sontag once wrote, 'is to become a little less provincial about literature, about literature’s possibilities.'"

Machado was born into poverty in 1839, the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves. A ferocious autodidact, he began publishing poetry in his teens. He branched into writing theater criticism, newspaper columns, librettos and short stories. When he died in 1908, heralded as Brazil’s greatest writer, he was nationally mourned.

For all of his heavyweight champions in the English-speaking world (including Sontag, Philip Roth, John Updike), his standing has been wobbly. It’s said that each generation rediscovers Machado anew. These two new translations bring another opportunity to enshrine the singular talent and mischief of this writer, whose late novels are insurrections against the novel itself, against its tendencies toward banal realism and earnest piety."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/books/review-posthumous-memoirs-bras-cubas-machado-de-assis.html

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/rediscovering-one-of-the-wittiest-books-ever-written

#bookstr