Books

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books/ Macmillan)

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.

“An astounding new voice.” —ERIC LaROCCA • “Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built.” —JULIA FINE • “Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound.” —JOHN KEENE • “Incredible. Truly wondrous.” —KEVIN WILSON • “Heart wrenching and wickedly funny.” —GWEN E. KIRBY ” • “Brilliant.” —VANESSA CHAN • “An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic” —KELLY LINK

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.

Advanced Praise:

“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. Interlocked stories form a cohesive and unique vision in this haunting collection from an astounding new voice.” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“I was blown away by Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil. Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built, Craft unearths truths about fiction writing, the contemporary immigrant experience, and what it means to live a life of art, all in the clean, marvelous prose of a decorated poet.” —Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild

“Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound, Lima achieves what most writers strive for, taking the reader on unexpected but always satisfying journeys while balancing the speculative and the real. Lima’s stories keep you thinking and reading. A gifted poet as well as a fiction writer, she knows how to create worlds that draw you in and leave you wanting more. By every measure, Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil, marks a wondrous fictional debut.” —John Keene, National Book Award-winning author of Punks: New and Selected Poems

“The stories in Ananda Lima’s incredible collection do something nearly impossible. They open up surreal and strange worlds that somehow resonate within the private spaces of our own hearts. Lima’s writing, like the best works of literature, confronts the fear of putting words on the page and transcends that fear to make something truly wondrous.” —Kevin Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of Now Is Not the Time to Panic

“Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a beautiful work of alchemy: strange and familiar, experimental and narrative, topical and timeless, heart wrenching and wickedly funny. No story is without an eye to the larger political world—from Reagan Halloween costumes to Americans dispensed from vending machines—and yet no story forgets the vulnerable human hearts that exist within that world, just trying to survive and care for one another, day after day. These stories weave a world entirely their own and beckon you to stay with the charm of Lima’s devil himself. I would have stayed forever. ” —Gwen Kirby, author of Shit Cassandra Saw

“My only problem with this book is the title, and that’s because I love it so much. Ananda Lima didn’t write these stories for the Devil, she wrote them for me! An absolutely thrilling reminder that short stories can be the best kind of magic, conjuring up not only the devil, but real emotion, real surprise, real strangeness.” —Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“Sings with inventiveness, humor, and wisdom.”—Alice Elliott Dark, author of Fellowship Point

“Ananda Lima spins us brilliant, resonant tales of people trying to make it through this absurd life. The stories in Craft amuse, entice, and entrap the reader with their devilish intimacy and beautiful prose.” —Vanessa Chan, author of The Storm We Made

Also available at:

Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021).

Poetry. Winner of the Hudson Prize. Shortlisted for The Chicago Review of Books Chirby Award.

Available from independent bookstores, libraries or Black Lawrence Press ᐧ SPD ᐧ Powell’s ᐧ Barnes & Noble ᐧ TSAB

“There is so much unbridled joy and pained tenderness in Ananda Lima’s poetry. Inspired by the poet Nathaniel Mackey and the musician Caetano Veloso, her verse streams effortlessly down the page, plaiting English with Portuguese, as Lima sings of the thrills and terrors of her new life in America, the pleasures of motherhood, and what she inherited from her family. Her voice is singular and wise and fresh. I love the poems in this collection.” —Cathy Park Hong

“Mother/land thoughtfully examines topics of immigration, family, and motherhood, combining fresh imagery that almost paints scenes in your mind with raw, vulnerable language.”—Farrah Penn for BuzzFeed

“In Ananda Lima’s luminous debut, the cultural landscape stretches vertically, from the bustling US cities to the tropical waters of Brazil. English communes with Portuguese, shaping a language that is musical and enchanting, though not without tension. For this speaker, hard-hitting questions about homeland, nationality and citizenship persist, as does the search for home. Mother/land gives breath to the immigrant’s bittersweet songs about what is gained with migration and what is lost, what can be recovered and what will remain out of reach.”—Rigoberto González

“Interrogating the liminal space of place as both mother and immigrant, Lima’s poems are full of the many small, but dear, longings and confusions of mentally existing in two countries at once and the separations between familiarity, families, and new experiences. She is masterful at tasking us look more deeply at the seemingly mundane, from making a peanut butter and jelly for her son to cutting her hair too short.”—Angela María Spring for Electric Literature

“Ananda Lima’s Mother/land is as much a mother’s grappling with how to raise her son amid the danger and violence of today’s America as it is an investigation of a daughter’s inherited, migrant Brazilian past. Lima’s poetry has the rare power to let us feel and “know the terror” of the present moment, while reflecting on ancestry and passing on familial legacy to the next generation. Her poems aren’t afraid to “shout ‘I’m an American citizen’ ” across borders and languages, while shattering the security of presumed identity and recognizing both the precarity and privilege of citizenship. Piercing and poignant, Lima’s voice and music stay with you, “undisturbed / by wind or water, there will always remain/ a footprint” guiding your way home.” —Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

“Brazilian-American Ananda Lima’s new poetry collection vividly explores the intersections and complexities of motherhood and immigration […] Lima masterfully paints bilingual portraits of child-rearing, transformation, and place.”—Priscilla Blossom for Reader’s Digest “

“Ananda Lima’s debut collection Mother/land, language crosses cultural landscapes effortlessly, full of the musical rhythms and family lore that have shaped the poet’s life. Lima plaits English and her native Portuguese in luscious verses that span a range of emotions as she tells us about the terrors and joys of motherhood, her new life in the United States, and being a human in a world that is slipping through our fingers.”—Gabriella Souza for The Rumpus

“Ananda Lima is a radiant poet, and her poems, too, are radiant. (…) This great book left me thinking about this country and the work we still have to do from the inside out.”—Leah Umansky for Poetry Society of America, “The Writer’s Desk”

“a profound collection full of wisdom thanks to Lima’s singular vision and voice”—Adam Morgan for the Chicago Reader‘s “The best Chicago books of 2021”

“Whether immigrants ourselves or not, Mother/land can speak to the many of us who have grappled with existing in a national context that puts up barriers on so many fronts, from language to physical movement. Lima’s collection resounds with both incantations in her mother tongue and with English refrains that burn blue with longing, with the search for home.”—Esther Sun for Counterclock

“Lima challenges our linguistic and cultural boundaries, our empirical knowledge, and the self-defeating American habit of reading history selectively. One comes away feeling closer to the sights, smells, and sounds within her world, and more attuned to one’s own.”—Mary Sutton for West Trade Review

“Lima’s collection is a gem that expands the conversation on America’s legacy as a land of immigrants.”—Amy Strauss Friedman for Newcity Lit

“a stunning debut”— Latino Stories, “2021 Top 10 “New” Latino Latinx Authors You, Your Family, and Teachers Need To Read”

“With tremendous experimentation in form, in Mother/Land, poet Ananda Lima grapples with the desolation of diaspora and how maternal love cannot always overcome the vast universe’s apparent indifference. […] a sparse, potent look at motherhood in the context of migration and the universe at large.”—Elliott Turner for Latino Book Review

Featured in Poet & Writers “Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin”

Featured in “New Confessions: Six Books by Latinx Poets,” as one of six poetry collections that “enlarge the poetic landscape and expand Latinx and Latin American linguistic and geographical boundaries”— Ruben Quesada for Harvard Review

Mother/land 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 heavily focuses 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.

Chapbooks

Amblyopia (Bull City Press, 2020).

Poetry micro-chapbook (available here)

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”?

“Amblyopia is an 18-page experiment that contains 13 miniature experiments, each unique in form or style, though all solidly linked to four woven thematic threads—photography, disability, motherhood, and the ineffability of language itself. […] From the first poem, which stretches and fades (literally) from English into Portuguese, it is clear there is something special about this book; but as I read, each succeeding poem continued to surprise and (beautifully) befuddle me. ” — Tyler Barton for The Common

“In addition to their poor sight, a perfectly sustained metaphor throughout, readers also catch glimpses of a former culture, a former country, and a former life disappearing for our speaker. The poems skein through Portuguese and English, attempting to tether this disconnect. […] “Seeing less than others / can be a great strain” Robert Lowell once wrote of myopia. Lima reappropriates that strain into a physical moving poetic experience.” —Abriana Jetté for Stay Thirsty Magazine

“No element of perception is spared by our thoughtful, inquisitive speaker. Language too, and the meaning of words, is called into question again and again. […] To see the world through another’s eyes is not just an intellectual or aesthetic experience, but a muscular one. Throughout the collection, the formal inventiveness of these poems embodies this muscularity.” —Megan Pinto for EcoTheo Review

“Lima returns to the boundaries between mother and child—what a mother can give her child and what she cannot, or how children can break away from their mothers and come into their own identities.”—Shari Astalos for Pleiades

Tropicália (Newfound, 2021).

Fiction chapbook, winner of the Newfound Prose Prize (limited print run, last copies)

The characters of this lyrical collection fight for their human needs in absurd circumstances. Spun from 1980s America comedic horror, Carmen Miranda, and the thin metallic plastic of emergency blankets, Tropicália reengages with 20th-century Brazilian art movements (Antropofagia and Tropicalism) from within 21st-century USA. The collection portrays the rich inner worlds of characters who cannot ignore how systemic forces shape their belonging, grief, and love.

“Smart. Funny. Weird. Bilingual. Timely as hell. Political. Brave. I absolutely loved the pacing, clarity, economy of language, and wild imagination. The way she engages with current events and popular culture in such a reduced space is brilliant.” —Gabino Iglesias

“Balancing absurdity, satire, and heart, Lima’s stories are delightfully weird and entertaining, but something ugly, haunting, and important lurks beneath, consuming her protagonists, and, in turn, her readers: the horror of what it means to belong, or not, in America.”—Necessary Fiction

“Lima’s book demands to be read as America finds itself at a crossroads that will shape the country for generations. For everyone who knows or is an immigrant and the anti-immigration policies of America, ‘Tropicália’ is a lyrical collection that will resonate for years to come.”—EcoTheo

Vigil (Get Fresh Press, 2021).

Poetry and photography e-chapbook. Available here.

Vigil is a meditation on motherhood, safety, danger, violence, and the state. Between the poetic lines are the hidden and the unsaid, and the beautiful and ugly present. These poems share space with Lima’s intriguing and evocative photography. Together, image and poem open our consideration of the world we live in and the world we’re leaving our children.

Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019).

Poetry chapbook, winner of the Vella Chapbook Prize. (available here)

“Lá na Bahia or on the 7 train, Ananda Lima’s poems house a stillness that moves gracefully on the page. Translation is altruistic in its soft haunt, its fleshly reminder that our daily self-discoveries are just the bones of ancestors waking for attention. The collection is a sun of moments gathered to greet us when and, wherever we may land after a long day of feeling like “other.” ” —Shauna Barbosa