Karol Lagodzki - "Controlled Conversations" & Ananda Lima - "Craft"

Authors Karol Lagodzki and Ananda Lima will discuss their books "Controlled Conversations" and "Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil." A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Seminary Co-op

RSVP Here (Please note that your RSVP is requested but not required)

About the Books:

Controlled Conversations by Karol Lagodzki

In 1982 Soviet-controlled Poland—a time and place of suspicion and mistrust—when geopolitical forces and violent men descend upon her little town of Zygmuntowo, Emilia must decide if she’s willing to risk prison or worse for self-respect and for her unexpected love.

A telephone station switchboard operator ordered to monitor all calls, Emilia overhears a mysterious coded conversation. It continues to distract her, but not as much as the growing realization that she’s falling in unsanctioned love with her best friend Kalina. Meanwhile, outside the city of Frombork, Antek, a shipyard engineer and a Solidarity labor union treasurer, escapes from prison and works to recover the union’s money, a task which in time leads him to Emilia’s town. In the metropolitan city of Gdańsk, Roman, a secret police major, wants the money for himself and dreams of his own escape and the magical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

As the only daughter of a local Communist Party apparatchik, Emilia has enjoyed a sheltered life, but with the advent of martial law, her mother’s influence can no longer shield her. She faces choices she never expected to make when she discovers her best friend’s and lover’s involvement with the resistance. With new allies and enemies in town, the time to choose a side is now.

In his debut novel, Karol Lagodzki asks: What would you do?

Craft by Ananda Lima:

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. 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.

About the Authors:

Karol Lagodzki, a native of Poland, is an exophonic, English-language author of fiction. His stories have appeared in many journals, and he has won Panel Magazine’s Ruritania Prize for Short Fiction. Controlled Conversations is his debut novel. He lives halfway down an Indiana ravine with his family, including a large dog. Find him @ klagodzki.com.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil and Mother/land, winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and The New York Times describes it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.