Living by their wits in the steamy slums of Bahia, a gang of orphans and runaways, led by fifteen-year-old "Bullet," spend their time stealing from Brazil's rich and privileged until public outcry demands their capture.

Along with "The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray," two masterworks by the greatest Brazilian novelist of the twentieth century, published for the centennial of his birth Published 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.

Originally published in Portuguese in 1943 as Terras do sem fim by Livraria Martins Editoria, Brazil. In this short novel, the aristocratic Badaros family is pitted against the middle-class planter Colonel Horacio Silveira in a struggle to obtain a crucial piece of land for the growing of cacao. Amado's true subject—and one he frequently comes back to—is the effect of the Bahia region's vast cacao plantations on the local citizens and the communities in which they live.

Widely considered the greatest work by the foremost Brazilian author of the twentieth century, The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray comes to Penguin Classics in a new translation by the dean of Portuguese-language translators, Gregory Rabassa. It tells the story of Joaquim Soares da Cunha, who drops dead after he abandons his life of upstanding citizenship to assume the identity of Quincas Water-Bray, a "champion drunk" and bum who is whisked along on a postmortem journey that climaxes in his loss at sea.