Today’s Arrival.
After a few random samples and the Dave Eggers* forward, I am really looking forward to digging into this one.
First Paragraph:
“I debated for a time as to whether I ought to open these memoirs at the beginning or at the end—that is, if I would start out with my birth or with my death. Granting that the common practice may be to begin with one’s birth, two considerations led me to adopt a different method: the first is that I am not exactly an author recently deceased, but a deceased man recently an author, for whom the tomb was another cradle; the second is that this would make the writing wittier and more novel. Moses, who also recounted his own death, did not put it at the commencement but at the finish: a radical difference between this book and the Pentateuch.”
—Machado De Assis. “The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.” 1881
*Eggers is the founder of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, also both worth your time.