Serrana Gay: Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
Staff: Serrana Gay, bookseller
Book: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
Serrana's Literary Style: "My favorite thing to read is fiction (probably because it's also my favorite thing to write). I enjoy work across genres as long as the sentence level writing is interesting. I would say, I am drawn to a phenomenal sentence above all else, but as someone who read only sci-fi and fantasy until I was about eighteen, sometimes a good plot or a great world is enough to hook me. I love short stories and novels equally."
"Lima is bold with the concept and the content of this book and I so admire that conviction." - Serrana
In Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, 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.
Serrana is a writer of fiction whose stories, although fiction, stem from emotionally complex personal experiences. Writing, for Serrana, is as much an act of catharsis as it is of creation. She loves the feeling of finding the exact word, or image, or turn of phrase, to express the thing I'm trying to express in a story.
