More erudition, serious or otherwise, is on display in the stories that seem to spring straight from Machado’s fertile imagination, spurred on by his own extensive reading. These take us to an ethereally exotic Thailand (“The Academies of Siam”), and even to the end of time itself, for an imagined encounter between Prometheus and Ahasuerus (“Life!”). The world of books and his imagination were for Machado a very real complement to that of the city and people around him, and they frequently collided, perhaps most vividly in “A Visit from Alcibiades,” where our unnamed narrator sits down after dinner to read a chapter of Plutarch and accidentally summons up the physical presence of the ancient Greek statesman himself, leading to an incident requiring the attention of the Rio chief of police.

Often there are references to the process of writing itself. Nouns and adjectives chase each other around the clergyman’s head in “The Canon, or the Metaphysics of Style”; verbosity and literary theory are lampooned in “How to be a Bigwig,” and, in “Fame,” a composer despairs at his loss of creative inspiration. Machado doesn’t just tell us his stories—he pulls back the curtain and invites us to watch his own process of invention.

The overall tone of the stories is one of ironic distance, an assumption that we share the author’s bemused fascination with the foibles and fates of these strange creatures, real or imagined. And while Machado gives us many male characters in all their flawed variety, there are possibly even more notable female characters: some faithful unto death and utterly decent, some infinitely vain, some maligned or scheming or flirtatious or indolent. Many of the stories appear to be filled with a kind of nostalgia for the past, as if the present were unsatisfactory or too shallow and transient, and yet the past is seen as something both irretrievable and inscrutable. One of Machado’s most famous stories, “Midnight Mass,” begins: “I’ve never quite understood a conversation I had with a lady many years ago, when I was seventeen and she was thirty.” Machado’s characters are often still puzzling over some past event, or hoping to set the record straight or to revive long-lost feelings. There are a few happy endings and happy marriages, but the stories abound in thwarted ambitions or loves unspoken or unrequited, even, in one story (“The Mirror”), a loss of all sense of identity, which can only be retrieved by the narrator standing in front of a mirror in his lieutenant’s uniform to remind himself that he does exist.