Her Body and Other Parties
December 8, 2019 6:00 PM - by Carmen Maria Machado - Subscribe

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...
posted by CMcG (6 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I’ve just finished this and I think it might go on my top ten books of the decade list. I found it to be astounding.
posted by CMcG at 6:01 PM on December 8, 2019


Loved it!
posted by triage_lazarus at 7:18 PM on December 8, 2019


"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order: SVU" was my introduction to Machado's writing, and it was definitely my favorite piece from the collection. It really got to part of what I started to find increasingly unsettling and disturbing about L&O:SVU, and totally changed my perspective of the show. Seriously, try watching an episode after reading the story, it turns every episode into even more of a horror movie than they already are.

"Eight Bites" and "The Husband Stitch" are close runners up though.
posted by yasaman at 10:37 PM on December 8, 2019


Love this book. Personal favorites include "The Husband Stitch", "Inventory", and "Especially Heinous" (which started out seeming like an in-joke I wasn't going to get, but grew on me the more I read of it). Honestly, though, there wasn't a single story in the collection that I didn't like.

I've heard her just-released memoir is also great.
posted by kyrademon at 2:14 AM on December 9, 2019


So glad I was able to grab this on Overdrive from my library right after I saw this post. Just chewed straight through it, so fun.
posted by gryphonlover at 9:07 AM on December 9, 2019


I had the same experience with the SVU story, yasaman.
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:39 AM on December 9, 2019


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