March 12th6:30pm
Writing is an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered”, says the Pulitzer-winning poet Carl Phillips. Join us as we delve into the mysteries of the art of storytelling. In this workshop-adjacent book club, we will discuss everything from plot beats to perspective choices to sentence-level sonics of major literary works and small press gems, in an attempt to understand how specific authorial choices shape the experience and impact of a story. You do not have to be a writer to join us — just someone with a deep love for literature and endless curiosity about how a story gets told.
This month we'll discuss Ananda Lima's intoxicating and surreal fiction debut, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil.
“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
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.
Reserve your place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the book club meeting on any product in store.