Machado de Assis
Leading Brazilian writer of the 19th century — novelist, short-story writer, poet and literary critic. Founder and first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, best known for novels such as Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro, noted for psychological insight, irony and realist style.
Books
This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.
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1. Papéis Avulsos
A compact collection of short narratives and sketches that probe the contradictions of urban Brazilian society with sharp irony and psychological insight; the pieces range from wry social portraits to intimate moral dilemmas, often narrated with ambiguity and compact, elegant prose that exposes hypocrisy, jealousy, vanity and mortality while inviting the reader to question appearances and the reliability of storytellers.
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2. Don Casmurro
A first-person, introspective memoir in which an older man recounts his childhood and life in Rio de Janeiro, his long love for a clever and enigmatic woman named Capitu, and the friendship with a schoolmate who becomes central to his growing jealousy; the narrative slowly unspools episodes of youth, marriage, social expectation and a possible betrayal, while the narrator’s uneasy memory and obsessive doubts leave the question of infidelity unresolved and turn the book into a study of suspicion, the unreliability of memory, and the moral complexities of love and honor.
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