PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is widely regarded as among the greatest Brazilian writers of all time. He was born to a poor family in Rio de Janerio and, with little formal education, took work as a typographer's apprentice and began to write and publish at age 15. Machado went on to a successful career as a writer of romantic novels and government bureaucrat. In the late 1870s he suffered a severe bout of illness, after which he wrote the ironic, complex masterpieces for which he is now famous, including The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas and Dom Casmurro.
'The greatest writer ever produced in Latin America' - Susan Sontag 'If Borges is the writer who made Garcia Marquez possible then it is no exaggeration to say that Machado De Assis is the writer who made Borges possible' - Salman Rushdie 'Another Kafka' - Allen Ginsberg 'A great writer who chose to use deadly humor where it would be least expected to convey his acute powers of observation and his penetrating insights into psychology. In superbly funny books he described the abnormalities of alienation, perversion, domination, cruelty and madness. He deconstructed empire with a thoroughness and an esthetic equilibrium that place him in a class by himself' - New York Times 'Machado de Assis was a literary force, transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy or James' - New York Times Book Review
