Dom Casmurro

A dead man narrates his own life story with no reason left to flatter himself. Machado de Assis broke the realist novel open here in 1881, decades before anyone else tried it.

Machado de Assis

Rubião inherits a fortune and a philosopher's mad doctrine along with it, and neither serves him well. A sharp study of money, madness and social climbing in imperial Rio de Janeiro.

Machado de Assis

Life inside a Rio tenement, where dozens of families, ambitions and appetites are packed into one courtyard. The defining work of Brazilian naturalism, in an illustrated edition.

Aluísio Azevedo

The love between a Tabajara woman and a Portuguese soldier, told as the founding myth of Ceará. Alencar wrote it in prose that reads almost like verse.

José de Alencar

Peri, a Guarani warrior, devotes himself to the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman on the frontier of colonial Brazil. Adventure, romance and the birth of the indianist novel in one book.

José de Alencar