Machado de Assis, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1839, is considered the greatest Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century and the precursor to Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Manuel Puig in the twentieth. Best known for two satiric novels: The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1880) and Dom Casmurro (1899), Machado de Assis also wrote many shorter works. The novella, The Alienist, newly translated by Alfred Mac Adam, professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College and Columbia University and a respected translator of Latin American fiction, is a hilarious indictment of nineteenth-century science, in which an alienist—the nineteenth-century equivalent of a psychiatrist—attempts to discover a foolproof means to distinguish sanity from madness.