Machado de Assis
WARNING
You are viewing an older version of the Yalebooks website. Please visit out new website with more updated information and a better user experience: https://www.yalebooks.com
A Literary Life
K. David Jackson
View Inside
Format: ClothPrice: $64.00
Our shopping cart only supports Mozilla Firefox. Please ensure you're using that browser before attempting to purchase.
Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell’s seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he’s funny as hell.”
K. David Jackson is professor of Portuguese and director of undergraduate studies of Portuguese at Yale University. He lives in Woodbridge, CT.
“I am astonished that a writer of such greatness does not yet occupy the place he deserves.” – Susan Sontag
“Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy, or James.” – Dudley Fitts, New York Times Book Review
“No satirist, not even Swift, is less merciful in his exposure of the pretentiousness and the hypocrisy that lurk in the average good man and woman. Machado, in his deceptively amiable way, is terrifying.” – The New Republic
“K. David Jackson’s essential book, the first comprehensive study in English of Machado de Assis, maps the extraordinary range of literary and musical sources that are key to this altogether extraordinary writer.”—Darlene Sadlier, Indiana University
“In this excellent, landmark study, Jackson sets out to remove Machado de Assis from the relative obscurity he has endured as a Brazilian writer, to insert him into the corpus of world literature, and to demonstrate why he must be regarded as one of the greatest of our modern masters.”—Earl E. Fitz, Luso-Brazilian Review
ISBN: 9780300180824
Publication Date: May 26, 2015
Publication Date: May 26, 2015
360 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 b/w illus.
2 b/w illus.
