Jorge Amado was one of Brazil’s most beloved 20th-century writers. His picaresque and colorful novels are inevitably set in his home state of Bahia, and are populated by a charismatic (if somewhat caricatural) cast of sensual mulatas, fishermen, charming tricksters, and Candomblé priestesses. There is usually a shot of magical realism involved in these highly readable tales. Among his most enduring novels are Gabriela, Clove, and Cinnamon and Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands.

Mário de Andrade was one of the leading figures of Brazil’s modernist movement, and his novel, Macunaíma (1928), is a Brazilian classic. The title character is a mutant figure from the jungle who begins life as an Indian and then morphs into a black man and a white man. While changing identities, he stars in a variety of comical adventures that integrate all sorts of popular Brazilian myths, folklore, and cultural elements into a highly enjoyable narrative patchwork that is utterly Brazilian.

Machado de Assis is not widely known outside of Brazil, but among international literati he has earned a place among the all-time greats. This 19th-century author was extremely vanguard, bringing a modernist sensibility and style, not to mention a rapier wit, to bear upon the lifestyles of the rich and corrupt in fin-de-siècle Rio. His two most famous novels, Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Quincas Borba, are both wonderfully imaginative and mordantly funny. His short stories are also quite brilliant. Try The Psychiatrist and Other Stories.

Paulo Lins, a well-known photojournalist, grew up in Rio’s poor and dangerous Cidade de Deus favela, infamous for its violent gangs and brutal drug traffickers. His background supplied the fodder for the gripping novel City of God, which was subsequently made into the highly acclaimed, eponymous film by Fernando Meirelles.

Clarice Lispector was one Brazil’s most intelligent and elegantly witty 20th-century writers. Her depth, human insight, and sense of word play are impressively displayed in her numerous short stories, which are meticulously crafted but don’t make for light reading. Her most famous and most accessible novel, The Hour of the Star, is a compact and searing tale of a miserable and homely northeastern migrant girl’s day-to-day trials and tribulations in Rio de Janeiro.

Graciliano Ramos was a novelist from Alagoas who was largely responsible for introducing social realism and regionalism into Brazilian literature in the early 20th century. Written in pared-down prose, his most famous work, Barren Lives, portrays the bleak lives of families trying to survive in the hard, arid Sertão of the Northeast.

Moacyr Scliar is one of Brazil’s most distinguished contemporary authors. A Jewish doctor from Rio Grande do Sul, he expertly crafts short stories and novels that often touch on the issue of Jewish identity (specifically in Brazil). Apart from his short stories, his best-known novels include The Centaur and the Garden and Max and the Cats.