Description
“Carmen Maria Machado has managed to have readers, critics and everyone in-between sitting on the edge of their seats for the chance to read her debut story collection. . . . Part science fiction, part fantasy and all fun, Machado’s stories deal with the sometimes unbelievable reality of being a woman in a way you won’t see coming; in a way that is entirely her own.”―NBC “Today Show”
“[Her Body and Other Parties is] written in prose so textured that you want to rub her phrases between your fingertips. . . . A muscular strain of feminism runs through this book, whose contemplation of the female body is bound up in sex, power, pleasure, pain, and the fitful struggle against self-loathing. Rarely is a writer as skilled as Machado at evoking corporeality: the myriad sensations of inhabiting flesh and bone, with all its messiness and ecstasies. . . . [Machado] blend[s] disparate, jostling elements to achieve a ferocious alchemy.”―The Boston Globe
“Imaginative, unsettling, haunting stories.”―BuzzFeed
“With supernatural flair, an engaging pop culture awareness . . . and an intimate, unrelenting style that grabs you by the throat and sinks its perfectly-polished nails in, Machado explores ‘femaleness’ in a way that makes women who evaporate or telepathically hear the thoughts of porn stars feel eerily, impossibly, like long-lost friends.”―Harper’s Bazaar
2017 Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
“[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay
“In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
