Her Body and Other Parties
In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella 'Especially Heinous,' Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show naively assumeded had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
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Eight stories, one of them a dictionary, one of them a season-by-season recap of every SVU episode. The collection bends genre on every page and uses horror to look at how women's bodies are read.
Yes. Her Body and Other Parties is a 2017 collection of eight short stories by Carmen Maria Machado. It blends literary fiction with horror, fairy tale retellings, and queer themes.
Yes. The collection won the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award John Leonard Prize for a debut book, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
Her Body and Other Parties was written by Carmen Maria Machado, published in 2017 by Agora.
Her Body and Other Parties is 248 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Her Body and Other Parties takes most readers 4 to 5 hours to finish.
Her Body and Other Parties is a standalone novel by Carmen Maria Machado, not part of a series.
Her Body and Other Parties is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
