SOURCE: "The Short Story Collections," in Machado de Assis, Twayne Publishers, 1989, pp. 61-71.

Below, Fitz traces the development of Machado as a short story writer, commenting on each of his collections.

For all Machado's innovative skill and imagination as a novelist, many critics, including Lucia Miguel Pereira, Renard Pérez, and Barrèto Filho, believe he attained his highest levels of excellence in the demanding short story form, a genre Machado cultivated throughout his career. His first published story, a comic piece about mistaken identity and a spurious love affair involving the narrator's wife and best friend entitled, "Três tesouros perdidos" (Three lost treasures), appeared 5 January 1858, when he was eighteen years old. In all, Machado wrote more than two hundred pieces of short fiction, many of which originally appeared in literary journals and were anthologized much later; some have been discovered only very recently. During Machado's lifetime...