This was a very well done collection with an interesting wrap around thread that really gelled everything together. Ananda writes very well and her prose flowed effortlessly throughout the collection. The pacing was consistent among all of the stories as well which I appreciated. I am looking forward to reading more from this author.

Interesting premise, engaging prose, well-written, and unputdownable! Way to go! Entertaining!

Thank you for the opportunity to listen to the ARC.

Thank you Netgalley, Dreamscape Media and Ananda Lima for the audio Arc of Craft - Stories I wrote for the Devil.
Narrated by Taylor Harvey

Took me a while to settle into this selection of short stories but once I did, I found it quite fun and different. The stories do vary in length, short in plot and character driven. What weaves the stories together is the MC keeps bumping into the devil in various guises. I almost felt that the Devil, wasn't the mythical creature we picture but more a man who the MC was trying to evade and forget but he kept popping up. Some of the stories were fast paced, some not so much.

This book was narrated by Taylor Harvey, who did a great job walking us through this quite quirky, unsettling narrative.

3 stars

I was excited to read this book. I love the title but it doesn’t fit. I fell for the bait and switch. I was expecting dark horror but what I got was basic slice-of-life lit fiction. Slice-of-life doesn’t work for me.

Like many anthologies, some stories are better than others.
Craft leans heavily towards literary and high brow horror with flowery metaphors and magical realism rather than gore.
It honestly read for me more like a dry memoir than a horror anthology that I was expecting going in.

What a great book. Craft is a collection of stories written for the Devil, but it doesn't go quite how you think. The book is outside of the usual genres for me but I found that to be refreshing and delightful. There were several stories in this book I really enjoyed, particularly the one about the vending machine and the last story in the collection about the photographer. The stories all felt unique and interesting and the wrap around story of the writer's interactions with the devil were surprisingly sweet. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys magical realism or just wants to read a few good short stories.

I listened to the audiobook of this and thought the narrator was excellent. This will definitely be a book I read again and it'll likely be a paper copy next time for a new experience.

Thanks NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is an anthology or mishmash of short stories about a woman grasping with her identity in the face of the gap that immigration to another country placed on her relationships with her family back in Brazil and the people she meets in the country she now calls home.

I've been on a serious audiobook kick lately, so when I saw the title of this on Netgalley, I immediately requested it. My thanks to Dreamscape media for an advanced listener copy of this book.

Based on the title you would think the devil plays quite the role in the entirety of the series of stories. In actuality his presence is only mentioned a handful of times and not within each story. Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil is, for the most part, from the point of view of "The Writer" a young woman who has immigrated to America from Brazil and is sharing her experiences in a somewhat surreal and unsettling way.

Other chapters appear to have been written by "The Writer" or some type of nightmare/dream world. My favorite of all the stories would have to be "Idle Hands". Told through the comments and critiques of The Writer's classmates in a writing workshop it shows how not every person reading something has the same perception of it. This audiobook is just like that. I have seen comments about how you can't really tell when one story is ending and another beginning and the negative impact it had on their listening experience. I would disagree here. I loved the seamlessness of the narration. The way that you truly felt a connection to each tale because there wasn't that jarring removal or ending from one to the next.

I am not sure if Ananda Lima's portrait of The Writer or the narration evoked such incredible imagery for me throughout the book, but I will definitely be checking out other works from both Taylor Harvey and Ms. Lima. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 for this well crafted collection.

This short story collection suffers from an imprecise synopsis and marketing. The summary states Craft as a “intoxicating and unsettling linked collection” with the genre of horror. This is most definitely a litfic collection with the underlying themes of immigration and government at the forefront.

The inclusion of the devil seems disjointed from the other stories, and it was all a bit too abstract to create a coherent narrative. I did find Lima’s writing to be compelling, but I kept thinking “where is this going? Where is the horror?”

I don’t think the marketing of this has done it any favours. I was expecting horror and this is not that. It’s not even really unsettling, I don’t think I’ll remember any of these stories a few hours from now.
It’s not a bad book by any means. I just found it quite bland.

I requested because this was listed as horror and short stories. Stories for the devil really piqued my interest.

However, this was very mundane. The stories are pretty much based around every day life. There is a ton of Trump hate, which is annoying. I don’t even care for Trump but I was still taken out of the story by the constant commentary around him.

The stories aren’t exactly short stories. It is more a style of longer novel where the same narrator recounts memories? It is hard to describe, I never felt like I could read them out of order. It felt like 1 long book.

The narrator was neutral. The writing was nice. But the over all book was not horror, not your typical short story collection, and far too overtly anti trump.

Do not recommend

"Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil" are a collection of interwoven short stories starting with a Halloween hook up with the devil.
I listened to the audiobook. The narration was well done by Taylor Harvey. The mother's voice was so different that I had to check that the narration wasn't being done by a cast.
The corporate America stories really hit home with me and were well written.
I enjoyed the way the writing critiques were incorporated into the story arc.
Overall a great listen. I enjoyed the devil concept throughout!
.

“The closer you looked at something, the harder it was to see simple clear lines…”

Ananda Lima’s Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil was a powerful thought provoking debut from a bold new writer and quite possibly one of the greatest executions of short fiction I have ever seen.

In Craft a writer has a one night stand with the devil and the following stories are the various ways he reappears throughout her life. Through hauntings, longings, viewings of Gremlins 2, and a life remembered through Triptychs and Hasselblad’s Ananda’s Craft asks you to look at all the ways we invite the Devil in and how hard it is to let our grip on him go.

Absolutely beautiful. A piece I look forward to revisiting time and time again.

An interesting collection of somewhat connected stories where a woman meets the devil at a party and then encounters the devil randomly throughout her life. As others have said, most stories are slice of life stories. Some stories were more interesting and had more fantastical elements. Some stories, though, were simple to the point where I wondered what the point of the story was. I listened to this on audiobook and wonder if I had read this physically or as an ebook if I would’ve understood it more. I do think I’d get more out of it upon re-read. This reminded me of Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett where the stories are sort of nestled into one another. 3.5

I absolutely loved this book! It was so unique and dark and delicious. I consumed it in one sitting.

This is being pitched as a series of stories written to the Devil after a woman meets and sleeps with him at a Halloween party in 1999… which obviously sounds awesome, but in all honesty is super misleading. Instead, the focus is more on immigration, politics, Covid and there’s not much horror to be found. I liked a lot about this, just not what I thought I was signing up for in the moment.

A writer meets and sleeps with the Devil at a Halloween party when she is young. She meets him again throughout her life, and crafts fine stories in honor of him . This is not satanic in any way and it was quite a joy to read. I love the way the stories are interwoven and the Brazilian/American immigrant experiences are remarkable. This was quite a surprise in a good way.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for this audio e-arc.*

I'm a bit baffled by the lukewarm reviews I've seen of this but oh well to each their own. This was subtle and clever- a series of interconnecting short stories with a framing narrative that called into question what 'real' really means. The devil is a marginal but important presence - a sort of dark muse who reflects reality as it is. Some of the stories were genuinely eeerie, others injected a notr of the absurd or of humour. Eacj story meditated on a different aspect of the human desire for belonging, emotional pain or want. Who says spec fic has to be outre? This was a fantastic collection.

Listened to the audiobook - received from Netgalley(thank you).

I enjoyed the narration but felt like the short story aspect of the novel would have been better to follow physically.

I love inter connecting short stories! I didn’t have to make a comparison between them…. They all flowed together so well.

I enjoyed the political undertones of several of the stories and the way it reflected recent events.

This overall was a very very well written/structured piece. The writing is sooooo strong and I would 100% reread this and anything else she writes.

This was a unique book I was not expecting. I listened to the audiobook and while I liked the narrator I wish I had read this book because there were some pieces I felt would have worked better if I could look at them, especially the part where the writer is getting feedback. This book did a great job showing the immigrant experience mostly because I wasn’t expecting it so it was able to hit even harder. I will say this book didn’t always make logical sense, but it was somehow still beautiful and created amazing imagery. But that amazing imagery was bizarre there is no doubt about that. I wasn’t expecting there to be bits about the pandemic, but it made sense and fit and was probably the most fluid and natural feeling representation I have seen. This is the kind of book that I will keep digesting for a while which I definitely like.

This was okay, but I definitely feel like the publisher and synopsis didn't fit the vibe. Tor generally publishes speculative fiction, and while there was a story with ghosts(?) in this anthology, that's kinda it? The devil isn't a character like I hoped.

The collection is honestly litfic with a focus on uneasiness-- being out of place as an immigrant but also out of place back home, the constant white noise of fear that a newly emboldened Trump's America will deport them without cause, and the constant fear+anger of being in NYC during covid.

I'm not a litfic appreciater, so this was a mismatch of reader and book. But I do appreciate that Tor is branching out to more diverse authors and offerings.

Audiobook Notes:
Pretty standard fare, narrated by a female voice. She does some accents for co-workers and parents in Brazil.