The first line of the first story in the book reads, In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. Most, if not all, of the stories feature women that are unabashedly horny. 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. As one might expect from a book called Her Body and Other Parties, the collection is full of sexraunchy sex, restrained sex, queer sex, straight sex. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. Description: 245 pages 21 cm Publisher: Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2017. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. Her body and other parties : stories / Carmen Maria Machado. 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.Ī wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. 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.
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