Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil

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. (June)