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 na vely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelg ngers, 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.

Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 10/03/2017
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781555977887


Award: National Book Awards - Finalist
Award: Kirkus Prize - Finalist


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2017 pg. 22
Publishers Weekly 08/07/2017
Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview 08/15/2017 pg. 11
Library Journal 10/01/2017 pg. 71
Booklist 10/01/2017 pg. 37
Shelf Awareness 10/03/2017

About the Author
Carmen Maria Machado's work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She lives in Philadelphia.