In-Person: Dual Book Launch CRAFT by Ananda Lima & MOUTH by Puloma Ghosh

Women & Children First is thrilled to celebrate the release of two exceptional short story collections: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima and Mouth: Stories by Puloma Ghosh. For this dual book launch, Ananda and Puloma will be joined in conversation by Jami Nakamura Lin!

Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required! By registering for this event, you agree to wear a face mask throughout the duration of the event, per W&CF's Covid-19 policy.

About Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

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 • "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.”

About Mouth: Stories

"Sometimes surreal, sometimes horrifying, always startling . . . Mouth introduces readers to Puloma Ghosh's unmatched ability to probe the visceral depths of female pain, desire, and grief." —Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness
BESTIARY MEETS THE DANGERS OF SMOKING IN BED IN THIS COLLECTION OF 11 EERIE, UNCANNY, AND SURREAL SHORT STORIES
In this debut collection, Puloma Ghosh spins tales of creatures and gore to explore grief, sexuality, and bodily autonomy. Embracing the bizarre and absurd, Mouth stretches reality to reach for truth.
“Desiccation" follows a teen figure skater with necrophiliac fantasies who is convinced the other Indian girl at the rink is a vampire. When a woman returns to Kolkata in “The Fig Tree,” she can’t tell if she is haunted by her dead mother or a shakchunni — or both. “Nip” bottles up the consuming and addictive nature of infatuation, while “Natalya” is a hair-raising autopsy of an ex-lover. In “Persimmons,” a girl comes to terms with her own community sacrifice.
Full of fangs and talons, Mouth lays bare the otherwise awkward and unmentionable with a singular sharpness. Through surreal and captivating prose, Puloma Ghosh delves into otherworldly spaces to reimagine ordinary struggles of isolation, longing, and the aching desires of our flesh.

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.

PULOMA GHOSH is a fiction writer based in Chicago whose work has appeared in One Story, CRAFT Literary, Cutleaf, and other publications. This is her first book.

JAMI NAKAMURA LIN is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade (Mariner Books/HarperCollins and Scribe UK, 2023). A former Catapult columnist, she’s been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She has received fellowships and support from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, Yaddo, Sewanee Writers Conference, We Need Diverse Books, and more. She received her MFA in nonfiction from Pennsylvania State University and lives in the Chicago area.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].

Host or Publisher Women & Children First