Keynote
A highly anticipated debut by “one of the most ferociously gifted young writers working today” (Michelle Huneven)
Book Title
Her Body and Other Parties
Subtitle
Stories
Cover Image
- “A love letter to an obstinate genre that won’t be gentrified. It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales.”—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
Body
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 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.
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 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.
List Price
$17.00
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About the Author
Credit: Art Streiber / AUGUST
Praise
- Finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle's 2017 John Leonard Prize
Winner of the 2017 Bard Fiction Prize
Finalist for the 2017 Kirkus Prize
Finalist for the 2017 PEN/Robert Bingham Award - “[An] imaginative and enjoyable collection, which charts dark territory with enormous style, wit, and storytelling panache.”—John Powers, NPR “Fresh Air”
- “[Machado’s] use of a vivid experimental lens to show women struggling for agency is startling.”—The New Yorker
- “Part science fiction, part fantasy and all fun, Machado’s stories deal with the sometimes unbelievable reality of being a woman . . . in a way that is entirely her own.”—NBC "Today Show"
