Her Body and Other Parties Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties

Stories

    • 4.0 • 209 Ratings
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction

“[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay

“In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell

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.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2017
October 3
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
248
Pages
PUBLISHER
Graywolf Press
SELLER
Macmillan
SIZE
6.7
MB

Customer Reviews

SNG092212 ,

Overall, quite good

The greatest downfall of this book is the story styled after Law & Order - it’s nonsensical and it tries too hard. It bogs the book down so badly.

chikcklit ,

Fantastical, phantasmic, feminist

Not my usual style, these short stories were an interesting read. For any Law & Order SVU fans, her story in that vein is a must read.

Nyambock ,

A must read!

Simply fantastic

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