Carmen Maria Machado's work has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She lives in Philadelphia.
"Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado, is a love
letter to an obstinate genre that won't be gentrified. 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. . . . Not since Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls
Raised by Wolves, in 2006, has a debut collection of short stories
from a relatively unknown author garnered such attention, or
deserved it more."--Parul Sehgal, The New York Times "Carmen Maria
Machado has managed to have readers, critics and everyone
in-between sitting on the edge of their seats for the chance to
read her debut story collection. . . . Part science fiction, part
fantasy and all fun, Machado's stories deal with the sometimes
unbelievable reality of being a woman in a way you won't see
coming; in a way that is entirely her own."--NBC "Today Show"
"[Machado's] use of a vivid experimental lens to show women
struggling for agency is startling."--The New Yorker "An abrupt,
original, and wild collection of stories, full of outlandish myths
that somehow catch at familiar, unspoken truths about being women
in the world that more straightforward or realist writing
wouldn't."--NPR.org "[Her Body and Other Parties] is that hallowed
thing: an example of almost preposterous talent that also
encapsulates something vital but previously diffuse about the
moment. . . . Machado is a master of such pointed formal play, of
queering genre and the supposed laws of reality to present
alternative possibilities. . . . Machado reveals just how original,
subversive, proud and joyful it can be to write from deep in the
gut, even--especially--if the gut has been bruised."--Los Angeles
Times "[Her Body and Other Parties is] written in prose so textured
that you want to rub her phrases between your fingertips. . . . A
muscular strain of feminism runs through this book, whose
contemplation of the female body is bound up in sex, power,
pleasure, pain, and the fitful struggle against self-loathing.
Rarely is a writer as skilled as Machado at evoking corporeality:
the myriad sensations of inhabiting flesh and bone, with all its
messiness and ecstasies. . . . [Machado] blend[s] disparate,
jostling elements to achieve a ferocious alchemy."--The Boston
Globe "The book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true
because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body,
and the realities of gender inequality make them so. . . . These
stories stand as exquisitely rendered, poignant hauntings."--San
Francisco Chronicle "Cross-pollenating fairy tales, horror movies,
TV shows, and a terrific sense of humor, [Machado's] work reminds
me at different times of such wildly divergent figures as David
Lynch, Jane Campion, Maggie Nelson, and Grace Paley; which is a way
of saying, Machado sounds like nobody but herself. . . . [An]
imaginative and enjoyable collection, which charts dark territory
with enormous
style, wit, and storytelling panache."--John Powers, NPR "Fresh
Air" "Her Body and Other Parties is an astonishing debut, dark and
glittering, like a night, or a knife. The stories in this book
unroll like millipedes, smooth shells of lyric giving way to sharp
joints and flailing, alien limbs."--Bookforum "Machado's stories .
. . have reverberated among readers with the prophetic force of a
soothsayer's divinations."--Vulture "Imaginative, unsettling,
haunting stories."--BuzzFeed "With supernatural flair, an engaging
pop culture awareness . . . and an intimate, unrelenting style that
grabs you by the throat and sinks its perfectly-polished nails in,
Machado explores 'femaleness' in a way that makes women who
evaporate or telepathically hear the thoughts of porn stars feel
eerily, impossibly, like long-lost friends."--Harper's Bazaar "In
her twistedly original and thrilling debut short story collection,
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blends both the
terrifying and the horrible into a psychologically realistic and
darkly comic mixture. . . . Simultaneously hot and chilling, these
stories leave the reader enthralled and shaken."--Chicago Tribune
"Thrilling and page-turning, smart and fearless, and very likely
the best book of the year."--Jezebel "Machado brushes past taboo to
treat women's sexuality with frankness and lyricism. . . . These
daring stories are deeply feminist, but never dogmatically so,
slipping into the murky places where we begin to fear our desires
and desire what we fear."--Slate "Between its covers, we find
ourselves inside a gorgeously warped reflection of the world in
which we actually live. It's recognizable as our own, but
everything is a little more lurid, a little more queer, a little
more violent, a little more magical than what we're used
to."--Nylon "It's rare to discover an author who can catalyze a
reader's laughter and fear in mere pages, but Machado succeeds
again and again, placing herself alongside names like Angela
Carter, Kelly Link, Helen Oyeyemi and Karen Russell when it comes
to genre-bending fiction with a dark bent. . . . This gloriously
engaging and utterly queer collection is necessary reading."--Paste
"With her first book Machado has already emerged a master of
several beloved genres. . . . Her work could be placed in
conversation with a host of fiction writers who inscribe the walls
of such stories with fairy-tale magic--Angela Carter, Kelly Link,
Alexandra Kleeman, Aimee Bender, and Lesley Nneka Arimah come to
mind. But there are stories here too that possess a courageous and
indelible originality."--The Village Voice "With Machado,
everything feels razed and built anew. . . . [Her Body and Other
Parties] feels determined to live well beyond annual prize-giving
cycles, to become that classic misfit survivor that readers and
writers keep returning to."--Star Tribune (Minneapolis) "Machado's
writing is full of repressed physical energy and the raw juice of
annihilating female fury. The body is the subject, the culprit, the
innocent. Standard accessories like ribbons become frightful. She
does unimaginable things with a prom dress. But these stories are
also funny--which really made me uneasy--because I could hear in my
laugh that same squawk a tiny dog makes in moments of
duress."--Louise Erdrich, The Millions "Her success comes not just
from the strength of her voice, but from the idea that by
recentering classic genre stories on the women who haunt their
edges, and diving deep into their subconscious, territory still
ripe for exploration will open up."--Vox "The stories in this book
are of the finest quality: sexy and threatening, strange and
playful."--Literary Hub "Her Body and Other Parties is a masterful
assemblage of tales that is at once luminous and dingy, sexy and
terrifying, queer and mundane. These wondrous stories remind
readers not only that the lives of women are full of paradoxes and
contradictions, but that fiction as an endeavor is especially
powerful when it takes as its task the examination of these
ambiguities."--The Rumpus "Machado's first collection of short
fiction is finally here for all to enjoy and marvel at. . . .
Surreal and subversive, this debut standsout no matter the
company."--W Magazine "A refreshing--and provocative--read."--The
Nation "She writes with a sincerity I didn't realize I was missing
until I found it in these pages; it's rare to encounter an
articulation of feminist themes that isn't self-conscious of them.
. . . Machado's work, like her characters, is accessible and
nuanced, textured without being overwrought."--Lauren Kane, The
Paris Review Staff Picks "Carmen Maria Machado is an Angela Carter
for 2017: Both of them have a distinctively gothic, bloody, dark
fairy tale sensibility, but unlike Carter, Machado is overtly
queer, feminist, and body-positive. What's most striking about
Machado's [Her Body and Other Parties] . . . is how insistently her
women are embodied, and how clearly their oppression manifests
itself on their bodies."--Vox "Machado's debut is the most
blisteringly brilliant story collection of the fall."--Book Riot
"All good story collections are in some sense unified by a style or
theme that binds the book together, but few cohere with as much
force and energy as this book. . . . Her Body and Other Parties is
an artful powerhouse and a writing textbook rolled into one. It is
fearsome and fearless. It is a book that won't be forgotten."--Los
Angeles Review of Books "Her work is brazenly unapologetic, or
perhaps unapologetically brazen. Her fearlessness, combined with
some spellbinding writing, delivers stories that are at once
discomfiting and revelatory."--Washington Independent Review of
Books "Artfully structured stories. . . . [Her Body and Other
Parties is] a vibrant collection that presents women in their
vulnerabilities and strengths in relationships with men, in
relationships with other women, and in reflection upon their own
bodies as they sort through the social conventions that have long
stifled their full expression of self."--Seattle Review of Books
"Her Body and Other Parties is as strong, and strange, a short
story collection as any you'll read this year. 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."--Commonweal "Machado's writing is embodied and
sensuous."--Tor.com "Her Body and Other Parties may be Carmen Maria
Machado's first book, but it's one that puts her squarely front of
mind as one of the most talented writers today. There are no rules
in the stories she puts forth; instead, it's all about buckling up
and enjoying theride--and boy, is it an enjoyable ride."--PopSugar
"The prose is inventive and unrestrained, with the deliberate
precision of a spider that probably, usually, kills her mates. . .
. Each story is its own, gripping universe, but perhaps even more
impressive: Machado exudes a palpable sense of defiance on the
page, slipping out of the trappings of what separates 'literary
fiction' from erotica; 'serious' work from fantasy; love from lust.
Her women often exist not as women with insatiable sexual appetites
for the man or woman opposite them, but for sex itself--an idea so
simple, yet radical in our present culture."--Girlboss "Each
[story] is clever, provocative and refreshingly new."--MPR News
"This book feels like meeting Angela Carter for a wild night of
drinking and dancing. The experimentation with form is simply
astonishing, and there is a directness in the treatment of
sexuality and identity that is both refreshing and deeply
affecting. I assume that I'll reread this book every year for the
rest of my life."--Rakesh Satyal, The Millions "Her Body and Other
Parties is compelling, gloriously weird, and, though some of the
narrators are occasionally deeply frightened, the stories collected
are nothing less than fearless. Genre and gender bending, erudite
and steamy, Machado's stories manage to defy expectation and be
compulsively readable."--New York Journal of Books "Machado melds
folklore and fabulist images with the raw realities of love, sex,
queerness and alienation, forging a poetic sensibility that's full
and alive with possibilities in a way that narrower realism could
never match. . . . Machado pulls everything together with bravura.
. . . [Her Body and Other Parties] demonstrates that literature,
when forthright and brave, can simultaneously dig deep within the
self and reframe the greater world."--Shelf Awareness "Machado is a
revolution. She is at once a funny, dark, terrifying, uplifting
anti-Lovecraft who observes in the everyday oppressions of
heteropatriarchy and late capitalism what is truly horrifying,
nonetheless finding release in the dark's nooks and crannies. . . .
Her Body and Other Parties is fiery, mischievous, and elusive. Like
the worlds Machado glimpses: brutal and yet life-affirming."--World
Literature Today "Machado understands and commands the body so well
it proliferates the text, and the reader is left with gasps and
sighs. . . . [Her Body and Other Parties] is poetic and powerful, a
profound call to action."--The Brooklyn Rail "A surreal powerhouse
of a book."--Vol. 1 Brooklyn "Machado bends much more than genre in
these brilliant stories--she's bending the very fabric of
storytelling, working with new models of textuality, orality, and
corporeality."--Ploughshares "Reminiscent of the work of Shirley
Jackson, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, and Mariana Enriquez, Machado
remixes strands of myth, horror, and pop culture and gives us
something uniquely her own. Her Body and Other Parties is as much a
thrilling reading experience as it is a powerful and important
exploration of women's lives."--Lambda Literary "A rich work of
literary horror. . . . An instant classic."--The Riveter "The world
of Carmen Maria Machado is bright and bizarre, full of magic and
haunted places."--Hazlitt "Stunning. . . . What Maachado is doing
here couldn't really be done within the bounds of conventional SF
or fantasy, but it couldn't be done without it either--and that's
part of what makes Her Body and Other Parties as important as it is
exciting."--Locus "This collection is brilliant, stunning and
strange--a wholly evocative read."--The Fold "These are stories
that listen more than they speak. . . . Machado, refusing
victimhood, turns her relatively hidden position into a strength.
She uses it as a form of protest, like her invisible girls in 'Real
Women Have Bodies', to say that, although the world keeps coming up
with new and interesting ways to convince us that some women are
worth less, worth nothing, she knows better."--The White Review
"Within that crisp writing style are humor and sorrow and a
seamless mashup of genres: from horror and fantasy to domestic
drama. . . . The world of Machado's heroines starts out just a bit
divergent from the one we recognize, revealing twists and
contortions that still seem bizarre but real."--Pasatiempo "An
original, stylistically cohesive, steadfastly queer book of
stories."--San Antonio Current "The best surrealist fiction resides
somewhere between the eerie and the actual, and that's exactly
where Carmen Maria Machado feels most at home. . . . A stunning
debut."--Los Angeles Magazine "The collection unpacks queerness,
the female body, feminism, and the fantastic with a surrealism that
will leave you
aching."--Philadelphia Weekly "Her Body and Other Parties is a
one-of-a-kind collection -- a potent blend of atavistic spookiness
and hallucinatory modernity, told with verve, witchiness, and wit.
This is the kind of book that will leave you haunted, and thrilled,
by the possibilities of contemporary fiction."--Dallas Morning News
"Machado blends a heady mix of fairy tales, erotica and magic
realism that toys with the readers' expectations and lingers in the
imagination afterwards."--San Diego City Beat "A blend of horror,
erotica and fairytale that makes for an original, stylistically
cohesive, steadfastly queer book of stories."--Orlando Weekly
"These are weird, sexy, scary tales that thrum at the electrifying
junction of fear and desire."--Indiana Review "These stories are at
once apocalyptic, timeless and brutally timely. . . . They are
merciless in their prescience, hearken to the gothic and pre-gothic
origins of magic, and are rooted in the brutality of womanhood. . .
. Do not miss this bitingly clever, astonishing work."--Book
Reporter "This could be a book that changes how you look at the
world, but that's not necessarily Machado's goal. Really, it's for
the ones who already look at the world with mistrust. For them,
these stories say: I believe you."--Fiction Unbound "Electrifying.
. . . Machado moves from the surreal to the real and back again
with incredible ease. This spellbinding collection marks the
arrival of an impressive new writer."--BookPage "Delightfully
visceral, these stories invite the reader to witness and experience
the various traumas and pleasures that women live in their
day-to-day lives as they are translated into a generic cornucopia
of horror, fabulism, surrealism, and more."--American Microreviews
& Interviews "Weird, sexy, funny and imaginative."--PureWow "Genre
and gender bending, erudite and steamy, Machado's stories manage to
defy expectation and be compulsively readable. . . . They launch
the reader into a realm rarely seen in fiction, and the journey, at
times discomfiting, is always exhilarating."--The Military Spouse
Book Review "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 "Machado creates eerie, inventive worlds shimmering
with supernatural swerves in this engrossing debut collection. . .
. Machado builds entire interior lives through sparse and minor
details, turning even litanies of refrigerator contents and
free-association on the coming of autumn into memorable meditations
on identity and female disempowerment. . . . Machado's slightly
slanted world echoes our own in ways that will entertain,
challenge, and move readers."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"The writing is always lyrical, the narration refreshingly direct,
and the sex abundant, and although the supernatural elements are
not overt, every story is terrifying. These weird tales present a
slightly askew version of the world as we know it and force us, no
matter our gender, to reconsider our current life choices and
relationships."--Booklist, starred review "This brilliant debut
compilation showcases a fresh literary voice. Machado's originality
and emotional acumen make her a match for Karen Russell or Kelly
Link. Highly recommended."--Library Journal, starred review
Ask a Question About this Product More... |