Written by one of Brazil's leading authors and columnists, Club of Angels was an immediate success there, and has been on the bestseller list since 1998. It tells the story of ten privileged men, who meet every month to dine fabulously and celebrate their friendship and singularity. When their leader, Ramos, dies of AIDS, the narrator Daniel meets his possible replacement -- Lucido -- in a wineshop. Lucido is mysteriously taciturn, but in the privacy of Daniel's kitchen, he recreates the men's favorite dishes, giving them a gastronomic experience like no other. The tale of bewilderment and death that follows creates an unforgettable literary experience. It is tinged with funny characters, witty dialogue, touching with mordant satire on all segments of Brazilian society. Club of Angels has been translated into English by the renowned Margaret Jull Costa (translator of Jose Saramago, Paulo Coelho, Javier Marias, and Arturo Perez-Reverte).

    She has long been interested in various aspects of magic but is searching for something more. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom, who begin to teach Brida about the spiritual world. She meets a wise man who dwells in a forest, who teaches her about overcoming her fears and trusting in the goodness of the world; and a woman who teaches her how to dance to the music of the world, and how to pray to the moon. As Brida seeks her destiny, she struggles to find a balance between her relationships and her desire to become a witch. This enthralling novel incorporates themes that fans of Paulo Coelho will recognize and treasure—it is a tale of love, passion, mystery, and spirituality from the master storyteller.

    His long suffering widow Dona Flor devotes herself to her cooking school and her friends, who urge her to remarry. She is soon drawn to a kind pharmacist who is everything Vadinho was not, and is altogether happy to marry him. But after her wedding she finds herself dreaming about her first husband’s amorous attentions; and one evening Vadinho himself appears by her bed, as lusty as ever, to claim his marital rights.

    The Apprenticeship was a bestseller and, as her biographer Benjamin Moser writes, "This accessible love story surprised many readers. When it came out, an interviewer said: 'I thought The Book of Pleasures was much easier to read than any of your other books. Do you think there’s any basis for that?' Clarice answered: 'There is. I humanized myself, the book reflects that.'”

    Macunaima, first published in Portuguese in 1928, and one of the masterworks of Brazilian literature, is a comic folkloric rhapsody (call it a novel if you really want) about the adventures of a popular hero whose fate is intended to define the national character of Brazil."Inventive, blessedly unsentimental," as Kirkus Reviews has it, and incorporating and interpreting the rich exotic myths and legends of Brazil, Macunaima traces the hero's quest for a magic charm, a gift from the gods, that he lost by transgressing the mores of his culture. Born in the heart of the darkness of the jungle, Macunaima is a complex of contradictory traits (he is, of course, "a hero without a character"), and can at will magically change his age, his race, his geographic location, to suit his purposes and overcome obstacles. Dramatizing aspects of Brazil in transition (multiracial, Indian versus European, rural versus urban life), Macunaima undergoes sometimes hilarious, sometimes grotesque transformations until his final annihilation and apotheosis as the Great Bear constellation in the heavens.

    Cicade de Deus, the City of God, is one of Rio's most notorious slums. Yet it is also a place where samba rocks till dawn, where the women are the most beautiful on earth, and where one young man wants to escape his background and become a photographer. City of God is a sprawling, magnificently told epic about gang life in Rio's favelas, based on years of research and Pualo Lins's firsthand experience growing up in Cicade de Deus. A book that gives voice to the dispossessed of multiethnic Brazil, City of God will earn Paulo Lins more well-deserved international acclaim.

    There she becomes Hilda Hurricane, an erotic force of nature no man can resist. The exception is reporter-narrator Roberto Drummond, who attempts to unravel the mystery of why the girl in the gold bikini would forego a comfortable life to join the world's oldest profession. While some in Belo Horizonte cheer Hilda's liberated lifestyle, others seek to have her moved outside the city limits, and a would-be saint cannot seem to finish the exorcism he began outside the Hotel Marvelous. Set against the social and political upheaval of the 1960s, Hilda's story seduces even as Drummond becomes aware of more ominous forces approaching Belo Horizonte.Hilda Hurricane was both a critical and a commercial success in Brazil, with more than 200,000 copies sold. (The DVD of the television adaptation has sold more than a million copies.) Admirers of Kurt Vonnegut will revel in Drummond's similarly sharp satire and playful digressions, particularly about left-wing politics, which blur the boundary between fiction and autobiography. Yet the real genius of the author's interventions may be that they never slow the story long enough to lose sight of this mysterious beauty swept up in the turmoil of the times.

    The next day they proceed to destroy each other. Amid vitriolic insults, cruelty and warring egos, their sexual adventure turns into a savage power game. This intense, erotic cult novel by one of Brazil's most infamous modernist writers explores alienation, the desire to dominate and the wish to be dominated.

    Leôncio sends Isaura to the fields to force her to yield, but Isaura flees instead with her father to Recife. There Isaura meets and falls in love with a well-to-do young man, Álvaro, but at a ball, she is recognized, and Leôncio takes her back to his farm, and orders her to marry Belchior, the gardener. But Leôncio is practically bankrupt, so Álvaro purchases his debts, freeing Isaura and leading Leôncio to commit suicide.

    Believing he was undertaking an important mission under direct orders by Leon Trotsky, Mousy has left his shtetl near Odessa and traveled to revolutionary Prague to rendezvous with a secret agent. But on the way to Prague, Mousy loses the envelope containing the name of the agent he is supposed to meet. In Prague, Mousy mistakenly meets Franz Kafka, who, in turn, mistakes Mousy for an employee of a literary magazine. Kafka gives him a text, the parable of Kafka's leopards, to be published. Mousy misreads the parable as a secret message and a call to revolution. His imagined mission fails, and he returns to his village. Years later, after immigrating to Brazil with his entire family, Mousy is tapped for the second great mission in his life--and a second round of misinterpretations takes place. At the height of right-wing repression around the time of the 1964 Brazilian coup, Mousy gives his fugitive nephew Kafka's aphorism and tells him to sell it to an antiquarian dealer in Saõ Paulo. When the Brazilian federal police stop to interrogate Mousy's nephew, they discover the Kafka text on his person and arrest him under suspicion of bearing a revolutionary message in code. Mousy must now save his unfortunate nephew from prison and redeem his previous misreading of Kafka's text.

    At one level it is the story of twin brothers in love with the same woman and her inability to choose between them. At another level, it is the story of Brazil itself, caught between the traditional and the modern, andbetween the monarchical and republican ideals. Instead of a heroic biblical fable, Machado de Assis gives us a story of the petty squabbles, conflicting ambitions, doubts, and insecurities that are part of the human condition.

    I was only four then. I never thought I'd hear from him again, but now we're writing a book together'To Georg Røed, his father is no more than a shadow, a distant memory. But then one day his grandmother discovers some pages stuffed into the lining of an old red pushchair. The pages are a letter to Georg, written just before his father died, and a story, 'The Orange Girl'. But 'The Orange Girl' is no ordinary story - it is a riddle from the past and centres around an incident in his father's youth. One day he boarded a tram and was captivated by a beautiful girl standing in the aisle, clutching a huge paper bag of luscious-looking oranges. Suddenly the tram gave a jolt and he stumbled forward, sending the oranges flying in all directions. The girl simply hopped off the tram leaving Georg's father with arms full of oranges. Now, from beyond the grave, he is asking his son to help him finally solve the puzzle of her identity.

    So when doctors prepare to end Lauren's physical care -- which would destroy the magical bond she and Arthur cherish -- he must find a way to save her. For, after all, it is only her love that can save him."If Only It Were True" is a heartwarming love story impossible to forget, an adventure that is by turns breathtaking and hilarious -- a captivating tale that evokes the essence of romance and our boundless capacity to believe.

    After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at fifty, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.With all of Bukowski's trademark humor and gritty, dark honesty, this 1978 follow-up to Post Office and Factotum is an uncompromising account of life on the edge.

    His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is masterfully done, hilarious, mischievous, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.