Jorge Amado – författare

A Brazilian Lord of the Flies, about a group of boys who live by their wits and daring in the slums of Bahia.They call themselves 'Captains of the Sands', a gang of orphans and runaways who live by their wits and daring in the torrid slums and sleazy back alleys of Bahia. Led by fifteen-year-old 'Bullet', the band - including a crafty liar named 'Legless', the intellectual 'Professor', and the sexually precocious 'Cat' - pulls off heists and escapades against the privileged of Brazil. But when a public outcry demands the capture of the 'little criminals', the fate of these children becomes a poignant, intensely moving drama of love and freedom in a shackled land. Captains of the Sands captures the rich culture, vivid emotions, and wild landscape of Bahia with penetrating authenticity and brilliantly displays the genius of Brazil's most acclaimed author.JORGE AMADO (1912-2001), the son of a cocoa planter, was born in the Brazilian state of Bahia, which he would portray in more than twenty-five novels. His first novels, published when he was still a teenager, dramatize the class struggles of workers on Bahian cocoa plantations. Amado was later exiled for his leftist politics, but his novels would always have a strong political perspective. Not until Amado returned to Brazil in the 1950s did he write his acclaimed novels Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (the basis for the successful film and Broadway musical of the same name), which display a lighter, more comic approach than his overtly political novels. One of the most renowned writers of the Latin American boom of the 1960s, Amado has had his work translated into more than forty-five languages.GREGORY RABASSA is a National Book Award-winning translator whose English-language versions of works by Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Jorge Amado have become classics in their own right.COLM TÓIBÍN, who worked as a journalist in Latin America in the 1980s, is the author of the bestselling novels The Master, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize, and Brooklyn.

A Penguin ClassicPublished here for the first time in English in a brilliant translation by the peerless Gregory Rabassa, The Discovery of America by the Turks is a whimsical Brazilian take on The Taming of the Shrew that will remind readers why Jorge Amado is to Portuguese-American literature what Jorge Luis Borges is to Spanish-American literature. It follows the adventures of two Arab immigrants—“Turks,” as Brazilians call them—who arrive in the rough Brazilian frontier in 1903 and become involved in a merchant's farcical attempt to marry off his shrew of a daughter.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Set in a Brazilian locale, this is the story of Pedro Archanjo, beloved rogue and fierce activist for social justice, who becomes a posthumous hero when an American intellect ""discovers"" his writings. The story flits between Archanjo's lifetime and that of the American professor decades later.

Banished for promiscuity, Tieta returns to the seaside village of Agreste after twenty-six years. Thinking she is now a rich, respectable widow, her mercenary family welcomes her with open arms. But Tieta is forced to reveal her true identity in order to save the town's beautiful beaches from ugly development. For the only way she can stop the factory is to call upon her close connections in Sao Paulo's highest political and financial circles—as only the Madam of the city's ritziest bordello can.

When Gabriela came to the Brazilian town of Ilheus, things would never be the same again In 1925, the town's cacao plantations are flourishing and progress reigns, but Nacib the Arab's most desperate worry is that his cook has walked out of his bar. He ventures over to the market to hire a migrant worker to help him and comes across a young mulatto girl named Gabriela who is wild and has hair filthy with dust. But something in her voice makes him take a chance, and it seems he's not the only man who's noticed her. Suddenly there is more to think about than everyday concerns: love affairs, murder, banquets, funerals, desire, hatred, vengeance and miracles.