The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
1 Rating(s)
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Author: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Flora Thomson-DeVeaux

Narrator: Gary Tiedemann

Unabridged: 8 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/18/2020


Synopsis

A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest black authors in the Americas



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.

Author Bio

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the mixed-race grandson of freed slaves, was born in Rio de Janeiro. Largely self-taught, he wrote many novels, stories, plays, and poems, eventually becoming the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and gaining recognition as Brazil's greatest writer.

Reviews