Oxford Short Fiction Book Club

Note: this book has been translated into English under the titles The Posthumous Memoirs of Bráz Cubas and Epitaph of a Small Winner. These are therefore the same book - feel free to read either translation (or indeed the original Portuguese...)

Machado de Assis is not only Brazil's most celebrated writer but also a writer of world stature. In his masterpiece, the 1881 novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner), the ghost of a decadent and disagreeable aristocrat decides to write his memoir. He dedicates it to the worms gnawing at his corpse and tells of his failed romances and half-hearted political ambitions, serves up hare-brained philosophies and complains with gusto from the depths of his grave.

Wildly imaginative, wickedly witty and ahead of its time, the novel has been compared to works by Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino, and has influenced generations of writers around the world.

We will discuss The Essential June Jordan, by highly acclaimed Jamaican American poet, activist, playwright, and essayist, June Jordan.

We will meet at the Victoria pub in Jericho, with a table booked in the snug, down the stairs to the right as you come in.

One of the most widely published and highly acclaimed Jamaican American writers of her generation, poet, playwright, and essayist June Jordan was known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Over a career that produced twenty-seven volumes of poems, essays, libretti, and work for children, Jordan engaged the fundamental struggles of her era: for civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom. A prolific writer across genres, Jordan’s poetry is known for its immediacy and accessibility as well as its interest in identity and the representation of personal, lived experience—her poetry is often deeply autobiographical. Jordan’s work also frequently imagines a radical, globalized notion of solidarity amongst the world’s marginalized and oppressed. Jordan uses conversational, often vernacular English to address topics ranging from family, bisexuality, political oppression, racial identity and racial inequality, and memory.