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Trade Paperback
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9781555977887
Overview
Overview
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 na vely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelg ngers, 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.
- Format: TradePaperback
- Author: Machado, Carmen Maria
- ISBN: 9781555977887
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 8.20 x 0.90
- Number Of Pages: 248
- Publication Year: 2017
Customer Reviews
Rating Snapshot
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Amazing read
Molly M. - 5 years 2 months agoThis was my first read of the spring, after procrastinating on starting it when I got it as a Christmas gift. That was a huge mistake—it was one of the best books I've read in a long time. A lush, queer, cutting, personal, weird, funny, poignant short story collection that I see myself returning to again and again. Add it to your #SpringPicks right now!!
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Read This Book!
Regina V. - 6 years 2 months agoThis book is such an amazing blend of poetic prose, magical realism, queer lit, feminist perspective, repurposed myths, repurposed pop culture, and great storytelling. Dark, lush, gorgeous, imaginative, playful, and intense. I am drunk off this book!
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Machado takes the line between fantasy and realism and weaves it into a genre all its own.
Moriah E. - 7 years 3 months agoIn these eight short, but haunting tales, Carmen Maria Machado takes us to the front lines of the battles of womanhood, both internal and external. A woman who takes inventory of past lovers at the end of the world. A simple green ribbon that leaves it's wearer shrouded in mystery. The ghosts we create through our own insecurities. These tales and more await the reader and beckon them in to the lives of the female gender and the violence that their minds and bodies have endured. Their scars are the heart of this book, which takes us to a universe reminiscent of the twilight zone with a dash of modern day horror. Machado marries the essence of myth, reality, power and pain to forge a voice all her own. This book is an otherworldly experience that will leave the reader feeling shaken to their very core. It has all the spine chills and goosebumps of a well crafted ghost story, wrapped up in the veil of unabashed humanity.
HPB Staff Review