Craft

At a Halloween party in 1999, a writer slept with the devil. She sees him again and again throughout her life, and she writes him stories about beautiful and impossible things. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an intoxicating and unsettling linked collection that lures listeners 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. With a singular voice in the narrative-bending tradition of Kafka, Cortázar, and Bulgakov, Lima speaks to Brazilian-American immigrant experiences—of ambition, fear, heartbreak, and home—with equal parts warmth and agitation. Strange, intimate, haunted, and hungry, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is a powerful experience: once listened to, you’re as much a part of the stories as they’re a part of you. The collection includes “Rapture,” “Ghost Story,” “Tropicália,” “Antropógaga,” “Idle Hands,” “Rent,” “Porcelain,” “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory,” and “Hasselblad.”