The twenty-one stories collected in Ex Cathedra—all originally published after 1880—beautifully represent this later phase. They take us on a journey to late nineteenth-century Brazil, mixing the mundane with the unique and sometimes hallucinatory human experience, as rightfully pointed out in the introduction. In one story, we follow a man’s relentless but unsuccessful attempts to get a loan for his entrepreneurial fantasies. In another, we witness the anxieties of an adoptive father afraid to lose his adolescent daughter when she marries. We find ourselves listening to a delirious dialogue between a member of Rio’s elite and a historic figure from ancient Greece about fashion and modernity. Or we observe the well-crafted plan of an elderly avid reader to make his goddaughter and niece fall in love.