Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

by Carmen Maria Machado Narrated by Amy Landon

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

Narrator Amy Landon’s candid performance allows the women of Machado’s short story collection to speak for themselves. Landon skillfully balances humor, sorrow, and a myriad of other emotions as she draws out the complexities of these women’s physical and emotional lives. “The Husband Stitch,” reminiscent in some ways of Alvin Schwartz’s retelling of “The Green Ribbon,” includes read-aloud directives, though Landon doesn’t demonstrate them. Landon strikes the right blend of fear and anger as women struggle to hold onto themselves during an epidemic afflicting women in “Real Women Have Bodies.” In “Inventory,” Landon’s reflective tone mirrors the protagonist’s attitude as she recounts people she knew before and after a disease ravages the populace. Fantastical and horrific elements woven throughout these contemporary tales ensure they’ll leave an indelible mark on listeners. J.R.T. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

Machado’s debut collection brings together eight stories that showcase her fluency in the bizarre, magical, and sharply frightening depths of the imagination. . . . The fierceness and abundance of sex and desire in these stories, the way emotion is inextricably connected with the concerns of the body, makes even the most outlandish imaginings strangely familiar. Machado writes with furious grace. She plays with form and expectation in ways that are both funny and elegant but never obscure. . . . An exceptional and pungently inventive first book.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

DECEMBER 2017 - AudioFile

Narrator Amy Landon’s candid performance allows the women of Machado’s short story collection to speak for themselves. Landon skillfully balances humor, sorrow, and a myriad of other emotions as she draws out the complexities of these women’s physical and emotional lives. “The Husband Stitch,” reminiscent in some ways of Alvin Schwartz’s retelling of “The Green Ribbon,” includes read-aloud directives, though Landon doesn’t demonstrate them. Landon strikes the right blend of fear and anger as women struggle to hold onto themselves during an epidemic afflicting women in “Real Women Have Bodies.” In “Inventory,” Landon’s reflective tone mirrors the protagonist’s attitude as she recounts people she knew before and after a disease ravages the populace. Fantastical and horrific elements woven throughout these contemporary tales ensure they’ll leave an indelible mark on listeners. J.R.T. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2017-06-20
Machado's debut collection brings together eight stories that showcase her fluency in the bizarre, magical, and sharply frightening depths of the imagination.Each of the stories in this collection has, at its center, a strange and surprising idea that communicates, in a shockingly visceral way, the experience of living inside a woman's body. In "The Husband Stitch," Machado turns the well-known horror story about a girl who wears a green ribbon around her neck inside out, transforming the worn childhood nightmare into a blistering exploration of female desire and the insidious entitlement that society claims over the female body. "Especially Heinous" turns 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit into a disorienting, lonely, and oddly hopeful crime procedural crammed with ghosts and doppelgängers. "Difficult at Parties" depicts a woman trying to recover from a sexual assault. She watches porn in the hope that it will help her reconnect with her boyfriend and discovers that she can somehow hear the thoughts of the actors on the screen. Women fade out of their physical bodies and get incorporated into prom dresses. They get gastric bypass surgery, suffer epidemics, have children, go to artist residencies. They have a lot of sex. The fierceness and abundance of sex and desire in these stories, the way emotion is inextricably connected with the concerns of the body, makes even the most outlandish imaginings strangely familiar. Machado writes with furious grace. She plays with form and expectation in ways that are both funny and elegant but never obscure. "If you are reading this story out loud," one story suggests, "give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb." With Machado's skill, this feels not like a quirk or a flourish but like a perfectly appropriate direction. An exceptional and pungently inventive first book.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171676049
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	10/03/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	508,580

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