SOURCE: "The Short Stories of Machado de Assis," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 1, Spring, 1968, pp. 5-22.

In the following overview of The Psychiatrist, and Other Stories , Nist discusses themes and techniques used in the stories, and praises Machado's subtle and understated style of writing.

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is generally recognized as the finest novelist in all of Latin America. Indeed the epileptic quadroon who founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 1897 combines such deep Dionysian wisdom of life with such cool Apollonian control of his medium that his genius must rank him with Flaubert, James, Kafka, and Proust. But it was not until forty years after Machado's death that literary criticism in the United States made a first serious assessment of the creative magnitude of Brazil's number one man of letters. In 1948 Samuel Putnam devoted most of Chapter XIV of his book Marvelous Journey to...