Book of the Month

CRAFT STORIES I WROTE FOR THE DEVIL

Author: Ananda Lima

Publisher: Tor Books

ISBN-10: 1250292972 / ISBN-13: 978-1250292971

SUMMARY:

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.

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.

About the Author:

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and the poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Witness, and elsewhere. She has served as a mentor at the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Immigrant Artist Program, and currently serves as a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers, and Program Curator at StoryStudio Chicago. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. Craft, her fiction debut, has received starred reviews from Kirkus Review, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and The New York Times described it as “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.” Originally from Brazil, she lives in Chicago.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Website: https://www.anandalima.com/ / https://www.anandalima.com/craft-2/

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CHICANO FRANKENSTEIN

Author: Daniel A. Olivas

Publisher: Forest Avenue Press

ISBN-10: 1942436599 / ISBN-13: 978-1942436591

SUMMARY:

A modern retelling of the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley classic that addresses issues of belonging and assimilation

An unnamed paralegal, brought back to life through a controversial process, maneuvers through a near-future world that both needs and resents him. As the United States president spouts anti-reanimation rhetoric and giant pharmaceutical companies rake in profits, the man falls in love with lawyer Faustina Godínez. His world expands as he meets her network of family and friends, setting him on a course to discover his first-life history, which the reanimation process erased. With elements of science fiction, horror, political satire and romance, Chicano Frankenstein confronts our nation’s bigotries and the question of what it truly means to be human.

About the Author:

Daniel A. Olivas is the author of 12 books including Chicano Frankenstein (Forest Avenue Press, 2024), and My Chicano Heart: New and Collected Stories of Love and Other Transgressions (University of Nevada Press, 2024). He is also a playwright, editor, and book critic. Widely anthologized, Olivas has written on literature for The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, Zocálo, Latino Book Review, and The Rumpus. He earned his degree in English literature from Stanford University, and law degree from UCLA. By day, he is a senior attorney with the California Department of Justice specializing in land use and environmental enforcement.

Website: https://danielolivas.com/ / https://danielolivas.com/bio

LinkedIn @daniel-olivas-3b25754/

Twitter @olivasdan