Let’s be honest. We writers dream that the books that live inside us will find their way into bookstores, libraries, and homes, will come to life in the hands of avid readers under shady hammocks or in favorite chairs. These books will have splendid covers and rave reviews that honor the love we put into the process. But for many aspiring writers, the journey between finishing a manuscript and launching a book is veiled in mystery. The cogs and wheels of publishing are strangely opaque to the authors themselves. Our Birthing the Book Series will both illuminate the process, and more importantly celebrate authors who have recently “birthed” their books.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and surreal fiction debut by award-winning poet, translator, and beloved Porch instructor Ananda Lima, joining us at The Bookshop in conversation with Fatima Kola.

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.

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Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago, IL. She's the author of the poetry collection Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft: Stories I wrote for the Devil is her fiction debut.

Fatima Kola holds a PhD in international human rights law from University College London and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. She has been shortlisted for the Caine Prize in African Writing (2015), and was awarded a Miles Morland Foundation Grant (2017). From 2019 to 2021 she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, and in 2023 she was an artist in residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Her work has been published by One Story, Granta, New Contrast, The Guardian and Zoetrope: All-Story. She is currently completing her first novel, about loneliness, the river Thames, haunted bodies, sickness, and time travel.