Back from Europe, Dr Simão Bacamarte settles in Itaguaí, a small town in Brazil, and opens an asylum there, the Green House, to study madness methodically. First he locks up a few slightly odd inhabitants, then respected people, then so many that the asylum ends up housing four fifths of the town.
With biting irony, Machado de Assis, Brazil's greatest writer, asks a question that makes us smile and think: who decides what is normal?
Full of humour, this short story can be read in one sitting in the language you are learning.
