Friday, June 19, 2015

Pg. 99: K. David Jackson's "Machado de Assis"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Machado de Assis: A Literary Life by K. David Jackson.

About the book, from the publisher:
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 José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he’s funny as hell.”
Learn more about Machado de Assis at the Yale University Press website.

Writers Read: K. David Jackson.

The Page 99 Test: Machado de Assis: A Literary Life.

--Marshal Zeringue