October 29, 2024
On the heels of our celebration of Clarice Lispector’s work, The Center for Fiction is thrilled to have united three contemporary Brazilian women authors for a conversation on storytelling, craft, and culture. Join us in welcoming Gabriella Burnham, author of the new novel, Wait, and Ananda Lima, author of the debut collection, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, for an engaging conversation moderated by Camila Santos, an alum of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship program.
In Wait, a young woman returns to her childhood home on Nantucket Island after a nearly four-year absence when she learns her mother has been deported to São Paolo, Brazil. Burnham paints an insightful portrait of class and immigration in this coming-of-age story about love, wit, and sisterhood. In Craft, Lima lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil where they’ll discover bite-sized Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of people who are not dead. 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 contemporary writers like Ted Chiang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Santos moderated this compelling conversation about form, migration, and writing about family.
Featured Books
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Wait
By Gabriella Burnham
Published by Random House Publishing Group
Elise is out dancing the night before her college graduation when her younger sister, Sophie, calls to tell her that their mom is nowhere to be found. Elise leaves on the next flight back to her childhood home, Nantucket Island, for the first time in nearly four years.
The sisters soon learn that their mother was stopped by police on her way home from work and deported to São Paulo, Brazil. Intent on bringing her mother back, Elise stays and secures the same job she had in high school: monitoring endangered birds. Meanwhile, her best friend from college, Sheba—a gregarious socialite and heir to a famed children’s toy company—reveals that she has inherited her grandfather’s summer mansion on Nantucket. Elise’s worlds collide as she confronts the emotional and material conditions that have fractured her family, as well as the life in Brazil that her mother has had to leave behind.
Told with penetrating insight, humor, and unexpected tenderness, Wait is a story about a family swimming against the social currents that erode bonds: housing precarity, immigration systems, and inherited wealth. But it is also a story about love, wit, and sisterhood, and how two sisters cling to each other in the midst of cataclysmic change, all the while dreaming about a better future.
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Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
By Ananda Lima
Published by Tor/Forge
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.”
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In Conversation
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Gabriella Burnham
Gabriella Burnham
Gabriella Burnham is the author of Wait and It Is Wood, It Is Stone, which was named a best book of the year by Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Publishers Weekly, and Good Housekeeping. She holds an MFA in creative writing from St. Joseph’s College and has been awarded fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, where she was named a Harris Center Fellow. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. She and her partner live in Brooklyn, New York, with their two rescue cats, Galleta and Franz.
Photo Credit: Amelia Golden
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Ananda Lima
Ananda Lima
Ananda Lima is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago, Illinois. 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, Witness, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers. 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.
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
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Camila Santos
Camila Santos
Camila Santos’s work has appeared in Hemingway Shorts Vol. 7, Columbia Journal and the New York Times. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation from Queens College and has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale and The Saltonstall Foundation. In 2020, she was named a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow. Originally from Recife, Brazil, she lives in New York City.
Photo Credit: Roque Nonini
