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