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This book is an interpretation of J.M. Machado de Assis, the Brazilian writer, and his fictional world. The central idea is that Machado put before us the theater of the world of Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s nineteenth-century empire. His writing exemplifies hybridity and metaliterary play in a blending of diverse sources that emanated from his exceptionally wide reading and quotation from a world library. His hybrid style produces creative qualities that the modernist novel of the twentieth century championed. By his invention of character–narrators to replace himself as author, his selective quotation from a universal library, manipulation of retrospective narrative frames, and ample application of satire and comedy, Machado occupies a deserved place as an inventor of the modernist novel and as a wry, wise observer of humanity.

This book is an original collection of Middle Eastern literature (Levantine literature). It offers a glimpse into a contemporary Middle East that defies common Western misconceptions and prejudices. Compiled over the course of more than two decades, the featured prose and poetry in translation reveals an extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, religions, languages, and cultures, and a surprising range of sentiments and ideas, that provide Western readers with a powerful new understanding of the rich mosaic that is the contemporary Middle East. The book explores the lives, thought, and works of some twelve Levantine literati, while assessing the possibility of valorizing a greater degree of pluralism in Middle Eastern public life, even as the modern Middle East as we have come to know it through the twentieth century seems to have “collapsed” in the aftermath of the 2010 events formerly known as the “Arab Spring.”