Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere.

In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of 'The New Vanguard,' one of '15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.'

Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Crawford Award. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.Ĭarmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Įarthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. 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. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. 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.

Her body and other parties