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. This 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.

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.