Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, in 2006, has a debut collection of short stories from a relatively unknown author garnered such attention, or deserved it more.” ―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from science fiction, queer theory and horror. “ Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is a love letter to an obstinate genre that won’t be gentrified. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction. 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.Įarthy 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. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest.
A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. 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.Ī wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. 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.
“In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. “ vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”―Roxane Gay Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
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