Sensory Chronicles

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's "The Delirium," a standalone story within the novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, is a masterpiece of the multi-talented author. In the story, a flying hippo carries a man in the throes of his life's last fever dream to the beginning of history. Seemingly timeless, and even antique in its allegorical approach to our collective, never-ending, never-quite-satisfactory pursuit of happiness, "The Delirium" nevertheless has an irreverent, wry, utterly modern sensibility that is perhaps the author’s signature style. This selection of Machado (1839–1908) also includes “The Immortal” and “A Miraculous Excursion,” two more stories full of what the critic Benjamin Moser characterizes as Machado’s winking, ironical, playful wit.