The first “dentition” of the Revista de Antropofagia, directed by the modernist Alcântara Machado, launched one of the most important documents of Brazilian modernism, in 1928: “The Anthropophagic Manifesto”, written by Oswald de Andrade. Although Alcântara Machado did not participate in the Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922, he became engaged in the modernist movement shortly after returning from his trip to Europe, in 1926, when he published his first book, Pathé-Baby. This presentation will underline the perspective of intermediality in the short stories of one of his books, Laranja-da-China (1928), in order to reflect on the avant-garde figure of the narrator in a simultaneously cosmopolitan and non-hegemonic context. The environment in which Alcântara's short stories take place is São Paulo in the 1920s, when the city was in a full process of modernization, at an accelerated pace, economically and culturally. The new means of communication and transport in São Paulo’s daily life, the new aesthetic trends of the European avant-gardes, and also a strong mark of orality in the stories, make up with vivacity and innovation the acoustic, caricatural, critical, jocular and cinematographic narrative of Alcântara.