Synopses & Reviews
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 - "Propulsive, uncanny, and expertly built." --JULIA FINE - "Trippy, eerie, wry, and always profound." --JOHN KEENE - "Incredible. Truly wondrous." --KEVIN WILSON
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," "Tropic lia," "Antrop gaga," "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.
Review
"Will delight readers crushed under the weight of the contemporary world." Kirkus, starred review
Review
"Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a creative book for
creative people, as much about souls as it is about craft, with one
finger expertly on the pulse of the American sociopolitical context. A
truly unusual collection; remarkable and memorable, each story
containing something meaningful to carry around." Olivie Blake,
New York Times bestselling author of
The Atlas Six
Review
"A terrific fiction debut... The stories, and the stories within those
stories, connect to some of the cruelest portions of the human
experience with uncommon warmth and wit." Publishers Weekly, starred review
About the Author
ANANDA LIMA is a poet, translator, and fiction writer born in Brasília, Brazil, now living in Chicago, IL
. She's the author of the poetry collection
Mother/land (
Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in
The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, The Common, Witness,
and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural WIP Fellowship by
Latinx-in-Publishing. 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.