Her Body And Other Parties - Hardcover

Machado, Carmen Maria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781259526 ISBN 13: 9781781259528

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2017

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FICTION PRIZE 2017
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018

'Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart' Garth Greenwell

'Impossible, imperfect, unforgettable' Roxane Gay

'A wild thing ... covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi' New York Times

In her provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado demolishes the borders between magical realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. Startling narratives map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited on their bodies, both in myth and in practice.

A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store's dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest.

Bodies become inconsequential, humans become monstrous, and anger becomes erotic. A dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite.

About this title

Review

Her Body and Other Parties 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 New York Times)

A writer of rare daring ... 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. (Justine Jordan Guardian)

Brilliant and unsettling ... Machado ranks alongside Shirley Jackson and Margaret Atwood, and she brings all her (there should be a woman's word to replace "mastery") formidable skills to bear in this tale of the rent fabric of women's lives ... Machado's narrators are articulate and thoughtful, with vivid internal lives. But she's sharp enough at capturing the messiness of ordinary human behaviour to distinguish one character from the next, keeping the stories distinct and marking each with flares of stark beauty. Machado has rare gifts, disciplined by years of writing short stories for magazines, and her literary fearlessness has already been recognised in the US, where this collection was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Awards. The stories in Her Body and Other Parties, on the vulnerability and the appetites of women, their transgressions and their disappearances, have the depth of fairy tales and the grim acid rasp of the best horror fiction. You cannot wait for her to tell more of them. (Financial Times 2018-01-06)

Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart, these stories have the life-and-death stakes of nightmares and fairy tales; they're full of urgent, almost unbearable reality. Carmen Machado is an extraordinary writer, an essential voice (Garth Greenwell)

The stories in Her Body and Other Parties vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange. Her voracious imagination and extraordinary voice beautifully bind these stories about fading women and the end of the world and men who want more when they've been given everything and bodies, so many human bodies taking up space and straining the seams of skin in impossible, imperfect, unforgettable ways (Roxane Gay)

Machado's verve shines through: macabre, erotic, and never quite what they initially seem, these aren't stories that are easily dismissed. (Lucy Scholes Independent 2017-12-21)

Daring ... Machado has created a provocative blend of fabulism, feminism, magic realism and lashings of sex. (Tatler 2018-01-09)

Striking ... spellbinding ... even the most banal settings become unnerving in Machado's pen, and her images linger with the reader long after the last page has been turned. Although her voice is invigoratingly fresh, Her Body and Other Parties never reads like a debut collection. Rather, it reads like a writer at the height of her powers - confident and assured, fearless and experimental ... it feels like discovering a well-kept secret you immediately want to share with everyone you know. (Kaite Welsh Diva)

Machado's work is visceral: tender, harrowing and sensual, it crawls right under the skin of your imagination. (SFX)

A provocative and powerful collection (Sarah Shaffi Stylist 2018-01-02)

Book Description

Wonderful and terrible humans skulk in the myths of Carmen Maria Machado's genre-bending debut - perfect for fans of Angela Carter's Fairy Tales

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1781259526
• ISBN 13: 9781781259528
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256