Paperback, 248 pages
English language
Published Oct. 3, 2017
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 …
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 naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, 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.
Not all the stories were as good as the others. I think The Husband Stitch was my favourite. Machado's prose writing throughout is exquisite even though some of the stories are a little too weird even for me to keep up.
I wanted so bad to love this book with all my heart, but it just didn’t quite have the impact I thought it would. The Husband Stitch, Inventory, and Difficult at Parties were the standouts for me among the short stories, though I did still have to do a fair bit of online reading to fully grasp what analogies the story was making. The story that truly made zero sense to me was Especially Heinous, in that one especially I find the points the author is trying to make about violence, feminism, and fetishizing peoples terrible experiences is buried under flowery (albeit incredible) writing, and artsy imagery and descriptions. This collection had that problem overall for me. I think I may try this one again when I’ve had more life experiences, I believe that will improve my understanding.
