Her Body and Other Parties: Stories (pb)

Author: Carmen Maria Machado | Paperback

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

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.

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**Kristen's Staff Pick**

I called this book revelatory when I first read it and even now, writing this recommendation, I still recall how reading her stories felt like walking into a house and seeing the interior architecture laid out so masterfully but unlike anything I'd ever seen before and thinking: I didn't know a house could do this! To say her writing expanded my understanding of writing feels a bit trite, but that's exactly how I felt. It was otherworldly and ethereal and wild and incredibly precise and experimental and messy and so hard to label. This remains one of my favorite collections of short stories.