Ananda Lima Books In Order

Publication Order of Collections

Ananda Lima is a translator, fiction writer, poet, and author.

She is known for her book Mother/land, which was released in 2021 by Black Lawrence Press and won the Hudson Prize.

She has had her work featured in various chapbooks, including Bull City Press’s Amblyopia. Her writing has also been featured in publications such as Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, and more.

Ananda has received the WIP Fellowship from Latinx-in-Publishing, which was sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. She has also been a mentor as part of the NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Immigrant Artist Program. She also is a Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago, and a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers.

The author holds an MA in linguistics from UCLA. She also has an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction that she received from Rutgers University in Newark. Ananda is also the Fall 2024 Flagler Storytellers Author in Residence.

Her fictional debut novel Craft came out to high praise and received starred reviews from publications such as Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Kirkus Review. It has been described by The New York Times Review of books as a debut that ‘announces the arrival of a towering talent’ when it comes to speculative fiction.

Ananda resides in the city of Chicago today and originally hails from Brazil. She is the author of video shorts Selou’s Last Days of Delicious Cool and Roupas No Varal.

Mother/land is the winner of the 2020 Hudson Prize and a poetry collection from Ananda Lima. If you have ever wanted to read some new poetry and love when an artist has a unique voice, check these poems out!

This book focuses on the intersection of immigration and motherhood as well as the effects that it can have on the relationship that the person has to other things, including other people, other places, and themselves.

It also looks into these various shifts in identity and the complications that it causes while at the same time taking a closer look at land, ancestry, history, home, legacy, and language. The collection also focuses on the experimentation that goes on with hybridity and polyvocality, the combination of the languages of Portuguese and English, getting into translation, transforming poetic forms that are traditionally repeating.

Told from the point of view of an American child’s immigrant mother, these poems also impart the deep parental love that the speaker has and her journey to her new motherland and the legacy that she brings there.

Full of tenderness and joy, Cathy Park Hong sees this author’s poetry as streaming ‘effortlessly down the page’. She says that she loves this collection’s poems and notes how Lima is able to go into the terrors and thrills of her new life in America, inspired as well by musician Caetano Veloso and poet Nathaniel Mackey.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach sees the poetic collection as ‘piercing and poignant’. She describes how Lima’s music and voice stay with the reader. It is about a mother struggling with how she should raise her son in America around all of the violence and danger as well as a reflection on ancestry and the familial legacy that we pass on to another generation.

This is a debut from Ananda Lima where the cultural landscape has expanded from the busy United States cities to Brazil’s wonderfully warm tropical waters, according to Rigoberto González. Portuguese and English mingle, coming together to make an ‘enchanting’ and ‘musical’ language. Rigoberto also notes how Lima dives into questions about citizenship, nationality, and homeland, as well as searching for home and what people lose and gain with migration and what can never be recovered.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a fictional collection of stories written by Ananda Lima. It was released in 2024 and is a surreal debut full of stories haunted, hungry, intimate, and strange. The author seamlessly moves from a compilation of her poetry to bringing together all of her stories together in one memorable collection that simply cannot be missed.

Upon release, many others have rave reviews to impart about it! This is a book that others have called ‘wickedly funny’ (Gwen Kirby), ‘remarkable and memorable’ (Olivie Blake), and ‘expertly built’ (Julia Fine). Grab a copy for yourself if you are a fan of this author or just love intriguing horror stories!

These stories include “Rapture” followed by “Ghost Story” and other intriguing stories such as “Rent” and “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” as well as “Hasselblad”. It’s a great selection if you like books such as The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. It has been a recommended reading book by publications such as The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and the Chicago Review of Books.

When a writer sleeps with the devil in 1999 at a Halloween party, she goes on to see him again at different points in her life. She also decides to pen stories for him that are about things that are both true and impossible.

Lima weaves imaginative stories for readers to enjoy, pulling them into different pockets of Brazil and the United States. There they will discover smaller Americans located in vending machines, as well as ghosts belonging to people who simply are not dead.

Once she has arrived at various paranormal points, Lima tells of different immigrant experiences that are had with various Brazilian-Americans, making sure to impart the various emotions such as belonging, ambition, and more, and shows us all some masterful storytelling along the way.

This is a great group of stories that is full of humor and one that is a must read if you love short story compilations that are all in one author’s voice. This debut has been praised by many and upon reading, you will soon understand why!

Get a copy of Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil to catch all of these stories for yourself and see why so many other people are recommending this book to other readers.