Ananda Lima

Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry - Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima. At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true. Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they'll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences-of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging - and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as singular and wise and fresh" (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: "Rapture," "Ghost Story," "Tropicalia," "Antropogaga," "Idle Hands," "Rent," "Porcelain," "Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory," and "Hasselblad." A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue . "Sophisticated and totally engrossing, Ananda Lima's Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is easily one of the most innovative works I've read in quite some time." - Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke "

Stories I Wrote for the Devil

Craft

"Struggles with sight inspire an expansion of vision in Amblyopia, Ananda Lima's micro-chapbook of poems that span senses, borders, and generations. '[M]y condition a pastel tinged party trick / watch me get lost in my vapor watch me / get by until it thickens into clouds / condenses down into my son's eyes,' the speaker says, describing the titular visual disorder as it is passed through the family. As formally astounding as it is emotionally tender, Amblyopia explores themes of inheritance and motherhood, language and migration, translation and assimilation, and more, inviting readers to consider more deeply, When, why, and how did you learn to 'see'?"--Publisher's website.

Poems

Amblyopia

Mother/land, winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize, is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker's relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.

Mother/land

Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry—Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning author Ananda Lima. "Remarkable and memorable." —OLIVIE BLAKE • “An astounding new voice.” —ERIC LaROCCA • "I love it so much.” —KELLY LINK • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” —JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” —KEVIN WILSON • "Heart-wrenching and wickedly funny." —GWEN KIRBY • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” —JULIA FINE At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life and she writes stories for him about things that are both impossible and true. Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. Once there, she speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences–of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging—and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home. With humor, an exquisite imagination, and a voice praised as “singular and wise and fresh” (Cathy Park Hong), Lima joins the literary lineage of Bulgakov and Lispector and the company of writers today like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil includes: “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.” A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ananda Lima

About

Books

Join the club