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

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

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is widely regarded as among the greatest Brazilian writers of all time. The grandson of freed slaves, he was born to a poor family in Rio de Janeiro 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 government bureaucrat and writer of romantic fiction. From the late 1870s his style became more complex and ironic, and he went onto write the ground-breaking stories and novels that would permanently charge the course of Brazilian letters, among them Don Casmurro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and 'The Alienist'.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator, with eighty-something books to his name. Recent publications include Catching Fire, a translation diary.