Craft
Stories I Wrote for the Devil
-
-
3.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
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.
"Remarkable and memorable." —OLIVIE BLAKE • “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.”
A great next read for fans of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties and V. E. Schwab's The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Recommended reading by Chicago Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review, and more!
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Get up close and personal with a nameless Brazilian writer as she depicts her life, her fiction, and her relationship with the Devil in a set of interconnected stories. This hall-of-mirrors work of metafiction begins with an intimate encounter between the Devil and a heartbroken young woman at a party, during which he confides how much he likes stories. She then proceeds to share with us (and presumably him) a series of tales exploring the tension of being an immigrant in New York during the Trump presidency, the terror of the early days of COVID, the somewhat fraught relationship she has with her family in Brasília, and the mechanics of creating a story (including the glorious, contradictory critiques of a writers’ group). Author Ananda Lima playfully journeys into the blurry area between realism and surrealism throughout this delightfully trippy depiction of modern immigrant life as a kind of horror story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Lima (Mother/Land) makes a terrific fiction debut with this stylistically adventurous collection of interconnected stories featuring an unnamed Brazilian American writer who sleeps with the devil himself at a Halloween party in 1999 and continues to see him pop up throughout her life. In "Ghost Story," the writer's mother is plagued by visions of her daughter's ghost, who appears older than she is in real life and who claims to hail from a terrible future. Workplace racism, the omnipresence of ICE, and memories of Gremlins 2 converge during a lunar eclipse for the young immigrant protagonist of "Tropicália." "Porcelain" finds a lonely office worker meditating on a rat's unexpected appearance in a Brooklyn toilet. In "Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory," the title locations are represented by a woman's experiences in an all-inclusive resort, New York City's Penn Station, and the one-story sprawl of Los Angeles, respectively. Lima's prose is lush and her well-constructed plots are frequently surprising. The stories, and the stories within those stories, connect to some of the cruelest portions of the human experience with uncommon warmth and wit. Fans of Gabino Iglesias and Carmen Maria Machado will want to snap this up.
