Her Body and Other Parties is Carmen Maria Machado’s first book-length work of fiction, and has won her international acclaim, but the Philadelphia-based writer is also an essayist and critic who writes for the New Yorker, Granta, Paris Review, VICE and more. She talks fiction, fabulism and body language with host Angela Meyer.

Carmen Maria Machado and her short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties

Gory, macabre and surreal, Her Body and Other Parties is for readers who like their fiction weird.

Machado’s debut short-story collection – which blends science fiction, horror, erotica and fairytale – is a work of bravura originality. It’s a book about the claimed and contested female body, and about the thrills and dangers of the flesh. With queer women front and centre, Machado’s stories are somehow both brutal and uplifting.

‘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,’ Parul Sehgal wrote in the New York Times.

Angela Meyer and Carmen Maria Machado

What role might romance play in rewriting the latent sexism embedded in our collective subconscious, over hundreds or even thousands of years? Can it teach women to discover (and ask for) what they want in bed? Join host Maxine Beneba Clarke as we get comfortable and explore it all, with speakers including Kate Belle, Kat Mayo and Beth Driscoll.

The panel, from left to right: Maxine Beneba Clarke, Kat Mayo, Beth Driscoll and Kate Belle

Romance is so retro: its pages are full of delicate women and dominant men, rape fantasies and senseless smut. Right? Wrong. Since the 1980s, romance has undergone a quiet revolution, unseen by the oblivious mainstream publishing industry. Women have become the subjects rather than the objects of desire in many romance narratives, more often choosing and using their men than the other way round. As opposed to mainstream pornography, romance is an arena where female desire is centred on enjoying pleasure rather than performing it. And while traditional publishing serves a patriarchal literary meritocracy, romance is run by and for women … and as digital self-publishing continues to blossom, it’s become increasingly democratic.