
Her Body and Other Parties Stories
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.
Reviews

Erica England @prose_choice

Essence@iridessence

maddy rowley@maddyrowley

Jillian Roberts@jillianroberts

Alli@maybeitsalli

Norie@themournfulpoet

Isabella Agostino@bellaray

jul@solarpqwer

Ryan Mateyk@the_rybrary

Wes Michaud@westhebookworm

Heather Margaret@heatherdarling

arwen@corienrielle

Lindy@lindyb

river@phlegethon

Liz Harris@surfthewebnow

nikki@zhailatte

andrea valentina @virginiawoolf

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azliana aziz@heartinidleness

Michelle C@mechanichell

Xiang@xiaoming

Caramel Constellations@starlitbrew

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Jaycee@ex_solipsist
Highlights

Erica England @prose_choice

Erica England @prose_choice

Erica England @prose_choice

Erica England @prose_choice

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