De Assis is a fascinating writer, often regarded as the foremost Brazilian author, though still little known and hard to obtain in the UK – he is also hard to pin down – a descendent of freed slaves he is a realist who is also surreal and experimental, a kind of South American Sterne or Voltaire or Gogol or Kafka (whom he precedes). The only easily available novel published in the UK is The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas(sometimes translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), which is published as a Penguin Classic and is a wonderful short novel – picaresque, digressive – one of my favourite moments is when, after a chapter about a donkey that has no relevance to the story, the next chapter begins “damn that donkey for interrupting my thoughts…” ‘The Psychiatrist’ (sometimes translated as ‘The Alienist’) is a wonderful story about a man who builds the first asylum in a town, and then starts widening his definitions of madness until nearly everyone is incarcerated.
Translation published by University of California Press, 1966. I bought this collection secondhand, it is also available on the Internet Archive. There are other editions available including as part of a collected stories from Jollyjoy Books (where the story appears as ‘The Alienist’) but I can’t vouch for the quality of the publication or the others that come up on internet searches
A Personal Anthology 