If you had to identify a literary antecedent, Angela Carter might be the one, especially in Machado’s persistent attention to the pleasures and dangers of female embodiment. In others, women fade into nothingness, or hear the thoughts of others, or have impossible children.
In another, scary things happen in the wilderness around a writer’s retreat. In one story, a husband urges his wife to remove the “green and glossy” ribbon that she wraps around her neck-and that might be keeping her head on her shoulders. From story to story, often from paragraph to paragraph, Machado mixes and matches genres-a fairy tale here and a post-apocalyptic vision there, a little science fiction sprinkled with a little body horror-reconfiguring old tropes and helping us to see what is at stake in them.
Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is as strong, and strange, a short story collection as any you’ll read this year. It's a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from science fiction, queer theory and horror. 'A love letter to an obstinate genre that won't be gentrified. there's a ragged glory to the stories' formal experimentation and erotic fearlessness, and the gusto with which they reinvent horror, SF and fairytale tropes.' - Guardian One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest.Ī dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite.
A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.Ī wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. Shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2018 Shortlisted for the National Book Award Fiction Prize 2017
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