' Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is a love letter to an obstinate genre that won't be gentrified.

But these stories are also funny-which really made me uneasy-because I could hear in my laugh that same squawk a tiny dog makes in moments of duress.' - Louise Erdrich, author of The Night Watchman and The Sentence She does unimaginable things with a prom dress. Standard accessories like ribbons become frightful. The body is the subject, the culprit, the innocent. 'Machado's writing is full of repressed physical energy and the raw juice of annihilating female fury. But there are stories here too that possess a courageous and indelible originality.' - The Village Voice Her work could be placed in conversation with a host of fiction writers who inscribe the walls of such stories with fairy-tale magic-Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Alexandra Kleeman, Aimee Bender, and Lesley Nneka Arimah come to mind. 'With her first book Machado has already emerged a master of several beloved genres. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction. 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.Įarthy 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. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. 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.Ī wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck.

While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. 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.

Her body and other stories