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 Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald...