That, very briefly, was his life, but, as Machado so rightly said, his writing was his life. He is probably best known to the English-language reader for three novels: Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; published in English as The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas or Epitaph of a Small Winner), Quincas Borba (1891; published in English as Philosopher or Dog?), and Dom Casmurro (1899). During his lifetime Machado published seven collections containing six short stories. He wrote at least another 129 stories that remained unpublished in book form until after his death. Most of the stories were originally published in daily newspapers—principally Gazeta de Notícias—or in magazines—Jornal das Famílias, A Estação, and Almanaque Brasileiro Garnier—with longer stories being published in serial form, chapter by chapter. Our translation of those seven collections was published by Liveright Publishing Corporation in 2018 as The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis—the first time all of those seventy-six stories had been translated into English in their entirety. In condensing that number to twenty-six stories for the purposes of this paperback edition, we have endeavored to choose the most important and the most original, while retaining a sense of the overall range and development of Machado’s story-writing. We have also unashamedly chosen our own favorites. The stories appear here in the same order in which Machado arranged them in the original seven collections.

The stories are predominantly set in Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of the Brazilian Empire. (Dom Pedro I had been proclaimed emperor of Brazil following independence from Portugal in 1822.) There are the occasional sorties to places a day or two’s journey from the city, such as Petrópolis, the fashionable summer capital in the mountains just north of the city. Other Brazilian towns, cities, and provinces get an occasional mention, but usually only as places that characters disappear to or return from, and vague references to “the North,” “the South,” and “the interior” abound. Machado himself scarcely traveled beyond the immediate environs of the city, and while his characters do travel widely, including to Europe, we, the readers, bid farewell to them on the quayside and only hear about their distant exploits secondhand.