Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil [L0088]

2024 - HCDJ Excellent condition.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. "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!

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "The author, Ananda Lima, is primarily a poet and it is clear in this work as the prose is, well, poetic; ebbing and flowing beautifully. In these stories Lima addresses the Brazilian immigrant experience in Trump's America and the fear that goes along with it. Strong themes also include womanhood and the art of writing. Many of the characters in this book seem as if they are idling in some kind of in-between land, struggling with identity. With such a fascinating premise, I was hoping for more scenes with the devil's presence but I think that because of my expectations I made assumptions about the role the devil would play in this story. However, this book completely defied my expectations and still, it worked."; "I can imagine there being discontent about this not being a horror collection, and it's risky of the publisher to categorize it so, since it does not aim at scaring, or grossing out, or terrorizing. Other than playing with the idea of the titular Devil, there are barely any horror elements, and he's quite mellow. If you go in with the expectation of not horror, but a literary fiction collection, these will be top-notch stories,"; "Considering the title--there's very little devil involved. Although I do think the exploration of stereotypes being turned on their head in regards to the devil was clever and the writing is strong--I just wasn't entirely sure what this book wanted to do. Or I just had too much of an anticipation on what I thought this book would be vs what it actually was."