"I passed away at two oclock in the afternoon on a Friday in August in 1869, in my beautiful mansion in the Catumbi district of the city." So begins Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubasat the end of the narrators life. Published in 1881, this highly experimental novel was not at first considered Machado de Assis definitive worka fact his narrator anticipated, bidding "good riddance" to the critic looking for a "run-of-the-mill-novel". Yet in this coruscating new translation, Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson reveal a pivotal moment in Machados career, as his flights of the surreal became his literary hallmark. An enigmatic, amusing and frequently insufferable anti hero, Bras Cubas describes his Rio de Janeiro childhood spent tormenting household slaves, his bachelor years of torrid affairs and his final days obsessing over nonsensical poultices. A novel that helped launch modernist fiction, Bras Cubas shines a direct light to Ulysses and Love in the Time of Cholera.