Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Readers who read the debut novel by poet and translator Ananda Lima, Crafts: Stories I wrote for the devilare immediately caught off guard by Jamie Stafford-Hill’s clever triple design. Does this book collapse, expand, or multiply? The answer, of course, is yes, all three things at once.

This feeling of disorientation is everywhere in Crafts. In the first section, we learn that our third-person narrator (known only as “the author”) slept with the devil at a Halloween party in 1999, where he made her realize she should be a writer. Then we come to a story called “Rapture,” in which a first-person narrator tells us that she slept with the devil at a Halloween party in 1981, where he made her realize she should be a writer. What’s happening here? Where are we? As Lima told the Chicago Review of Books, “It’s somewhere on the continuum between a short story collection, a novel within stories, and a novel. I like things that are hard to categorize.”

In Rapture, the devil is a charming and handsome party guest dressed in “an ill-fitting suit, a faded orange wig, and bad makeup.” (When asked about his costume, he says he’s “the future.”) As she flirts with him, the narrator, who may be “the author,” learns that the devil is misunderstood; he mostly tries to use his powers for good, but his efforts never succeed. The devil tells her that they are kindred spirits because they both love stories, thus providing an origin story for her writing career. If that sounds a little too wholesome for you, don’t worry—there’s also a very hot supernatural sex scene.

The rest Crafts alternates between untitled passages focusing on the author’s encounters with the devil and titles of stories she may or may not be writing for him or because of him. These different sections blur together in unexpected ways, mystical and metafictional.

In “Idle Hands,” a story composed of the author’s critiques of her story titled “Idle Hands,” she receives conflicting advice about what the author should do with the story—but most of her workshop readers are drawn to a character named Mr. D. A story that was described as difficult to finish in an early part of the workshop suddenly resurfaces later in Crafts like the spooky short film “Rent.” We learn the surprising reason behind where the word “craft” comes from in the book’s title, although this revelation is too entertaining to give away.

Not all of the story titles here work. “Porcelain,” a story about what a lonely character named Bernard thinks about a story about a rat coming out of a Brooklyn toilet, feels truncated and half-baked, like it’s the popular opening to an abandoned novel. “Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” describes three different earthly parallels to the afterlife; the language is beautiful, but the scenarios are too trite.

The stories in Crafts the most caustic are those in which Lima, who grew up in Brasília, comes to terms with her bicultural heritage. In “Ghost Story,” the author flies home to see her family, only to be confronted with how much they have all changed since she moved to the United States. The author is horrified to see her beloved parents supporting Jair Bolsonaro’s policies and her brother being a prominent donor to a Brazilian megachurch. In addition, her mother has seen a ghost in the house; eerily, this ghost takes the form of the author herself, albeit an older and angrier version who somehow survived a global catastrophe. (Later in the Craftsthe author thinks of a new ending for this story.)

Another story, “Tropicália,” describes the paranoia of a Brazilian woman who is climbing the corporate ladder and suddenly loses her passport… in Donald Trump’s America: “I remember reading that it takes ten years for a human skeleton to be completely restored through cell renewal… I thought I was the eater, but America was eating me from the inside the whole time.”

The triumph of these titled stories is called “Antropófaga.” This is a clear allusion to modernist poet Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928), one of the most famous works of Brazilian cultural theory. In his manifesto, Andrade claimed that Brazil’s greatest strength was its habit of “cannibalizing” other cultures, rearranging them to forge a new path. “Antropófaga” approaches this theory from a different angle; its shocking first line reads: “She devoured tiny Americans that slipped out of a vending machine.” Béia, an exhausted Brazilian hospital worker in the United States, knows she shouldn’t buy these snacks, but she can’t help herself. “That week, Béia devoured a bodybuilder in an American flag Speedo who posed in front of her as if she were a mirror. Then a frat boy drinking from a red plastic cup, nodding his head slightly to the beat…” Lima’s language is dreamy but precise as she describes this surreal cannibalism. Things don’t end well.

The unnamed passages in Crafts are just as haunting as the stories with names. The devil appears to the author again and again in different situations: flirting with her at the DMV, helping her understand a painting at the Guggenheim, reminding her to get off the subway at the right stop, and perhaps helping her save her husband Peter from death. If we think of the devil as the one who unleashed Ananda Lima’s talent for writing elusive and heartbreaking stories, we owe this misunderstood scapegoat some credit.