Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Carmen Maria Machado carelessly demolishes the artificial boundaries between science fiction and psychological reality, humour and horror, and fantasy and fabulism in Her Body and Other Parties. She has been compared to Karen Russell and Kelly Link because of her work, yet she has a unique voice of her own. In this captivating and thought-provoking debut, Machado manipulates genre to create striking tales that depict the brutality inflicted upon women's bodies and the reality of their existence.

Wives don't listen to their husbands requests to take off the green ribbon around their necks. A lady describes her sex life as a virus steadily eats away at civilization. A frightening discovery is made by a mall salesperson within the prom dress store's seams. An unpleasant houseguest is the effect of a lady having weight reduction surgery. Furthermore, Machado creates a fantastical police procedural full of ghosts, doppelgängers, and ladies with bells for eyes by reimagining every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a programme we foolishly believed to have seen it all. This is done in the bravura novella Especially Heinous.

Her Body and Other Parties oscillates between horrifying brutality and the most beautiful feeling. It is both earthly and otherworldly, antic and seductive, queer and caustic, humorous and deadly serious. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

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