The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (Translated by Thomson-DeVeaux 2020)

✍ Scribed by Machado de Assis

• Publisher: Penguin Books; Penguin Random House
• Year: 1881
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 197 KB
• Edition: Penguin Books (2020)
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 0525506683
• ASIN: B081M5RL5S

✦ Synopsis

{ NOV 2021 - Verified ebook for complete book description, cover, table of contents, separation of book (front/ back matter, parts, and chapters), and epub format error checking. }
Paperback, 368 pages
Published: 1881
Edition: Penguin Books (2020)
Greatest Books (amalgamated list of best books)
Translated from the Portuguese, introduction, and notes by: Flora Thomson-DeVeaux (2020)
Foreword by: Dave Eggers
Original title: "Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas" by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
A revelatory new translation of the playful, incomparable masterpiece of one of the greatest black authors in the Americas. One of two translations for 2020.
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, in 160 brief chapters, 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.
This new English translation is the first to include extensive notes providing crucial historical and cultural context and also includes excerpts from previous versions of the novel never before published in English.