Craft

January 1, 2024

Award-winning poet Lima offers her debut story collection, which gets a 75K-copy first printing. After sleeping with the devil at a Halloween party in 1999, a writer sees him throughout her life and pens him tales in this linked collection of surreal stories that take place in the U.S. and Lima's native Brazil. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 25, 2024
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.

April 1, 2024

DEBUT Poet and translator Lima's (Mother/land) fiction debut is a novel in stories, which "the writer" creates for the devil throughout her life, after sleeping with him at a party. The "stories" are interrupted by unnamed chapters, told by a third-person narrator, who draws readers into the writer's "real" life outside of her fiction, enhancing their connection to the writer's work as well as her obstacles as a Brazilian immigrant, a distant daughter, and an eventual wife. The speculative stories range from weird and chilling (such as "Antrop�faga," where the main character eats "tiny Americans" and a work vending machine) to emotionally devastating (such as "Ghost Story," in which the protagonist finds that the ghost of her older self is haunting her mother). However, it is the writer and her interactions with the devil (rendered with both sympathy and healthy fear) throughout her life that add a surreal hue, uniting the entire volume into one of the most original and unforgettable reads of the year. VERDICT A captivating, alluring, and, at times, illicit book that is conscious of the craft of the storytelling process without sacrificing an extraordinary reading experience. It recalls Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin, Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward, and Coyote Songs by Gabino Iglesias.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2024
One Halloween night, a woman sleeps with the devil. From there our story unfolds--for she'll see him again, but not how the reader might expect, because the devil is kinder, subtler, and warmer than we might think. The woman is a writer, and, in a metaframing device, the stories collected in this work appear to be hers. In "Tropic�lia," a Brazilian-immigrant woman in New York City loses her passport in the modern-day dystopia of surveillance and corporate nonsense; in "Antrop�gaga," a cleaning woman becomes addicted to eating small humans she gets from the hospital vending machine. Lima combines her experiments with absurd narratives and satirical fiction with experiments in craft--"Idle Hands" is a story entirely made up of a writing workshop's critiques. This collection explores everything from the unique experiences of loss, fear, and disconnection felt by Brazilian immigrants to the U.S. to the frustrating pain of being a writer or photographer in an increasingly corporate, dystopian world.

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Starred review from June 15, 2024
Brazil-born Lima explores questions of identity, politics, and creativity through a surrealist lens in these short stories. The Devil is a recurring figure in Lima's collection, sometimes appearing as a figure of intrigue, other times as a source of inspiration. In the opening story, "Rapture," the main character is not a writer when she first meets the Devil, "at least not openly so." And yet, "the Devil had known...the space she had inside her to carry her stories. He had known her hunger." As if a telepathic confidant, the Devil intuits who the writer is before she herself knows and helps instruct her on how to fulfill her creative vocation. Lima sometimes features characters in the very process of writing, as in "Ghost Story," in which the narrator "type[s] 'Ghost Story' at the top of the page and wonder[s] where to start." While her characters may not know what should come next, Lima adroitly comments on everything from MFA workshops to Brazilian politics with cheeky aplomb. Though this is not an overtly political book, the specter of neoliberalism in both Brazil and the U.S. hovers on the periphery of many stories. Often, the hellscape of global politics occurs on the television in another room, an ongoing commentary that is ever present, though muted like white noise. The personal becomes political within literary spaces where "sometimes, when the immigrant writer wrote, there was no migration in the story, and she wondered if there should be. Sometimes the immigrant writer wrote immigrant stories and wondered if she shouldn't. These were the kind of questions she talked about with the Devil." Who gets to tell certain stories and why? The book's title evokes both guile and labor, cunning and skill. The dream for Lima's characters, plagued by global pandemics and wealth disparities, is not health or fame, but writing. Art may not save us from the Devil or hell on earth, but it can come close. Stories that will delight readers crushed under the weight of the contemporary world.

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