Her Body and Other Parties

220 Pages·2017·1.01 MB·English

by  Carmen Maria Machado

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES
“Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties tells ancient
fables of eros and female metamorphosis in fantastically new ways.
She draws the secret world of the body into visibility, and illuminates
the dark woods of the psyche. In these formally brilliant and
emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s
memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”
—Karen Russell
“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 Maria Machado is an
extraordinary writer, an essential voice.”
—Garth Greenwell
“The stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s 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
“Her Body and Other Parties will delight you, hurt you, and astonish
you as only the smartest literature can. In this collection Carmen
Maria Machado blends horror, fairy tale, pop culture, and myth in
mesmerizing ways that feel utterly new. These stories are peerless and
brilliant.”
—Alissa Nutting
“Her Body and Other Parties is genius: part punk rock and part
classical, with stories that are raw and devastating but also
exquisitely plotted and full of delight. This is a strong, dangerous, and
blisteringly honest book—it’s hard to think of it as a ‘debut,’ it’s that
good.”
—Jeff VanderMeer
“Those of us who knew have been waiting for a Carmen Maria
Machado collection for years. Her stories show us what we really love
and fear.”
—Alexander Chee
“Carmen Maria Machado writes a new kind of fiction: brilliant,
blindingly weird, and precisely attuned to the perils and sorrows of
the times.”
—Ben Marcus
“What Carmen Maria Machado has done with this collection is
nothing less than stunning. Just when you think you’ve figured her
out, she unveils another layer of story, so unexpected, so profound, it
leaves you gasping.”
—Lesley Nneka Arimah
“Carmen Maria Machado has a vital, visceral, umbilical connection to
the places deep within the soul from where stories emanate. With a
tenderness that is both touching and terrifying, Her Body and Other
Parties gives insight into a cluster of worlds linked by their depth of
feeling and penetrating strangeness.”
—Alexandra Kleeman
“An astonishing and supple debut. Carmen Maria Machado shuffles
together fantastic, realistic, popular, and literary genres and then
deals winning hand after winning hand. Whether it is reworking fairy
tales, rewriting the entire run of Law & Order into a grim fantasy, or
diving into unchartered territory entirely Machado’s own, Her Body
and Other Parties is a deft and thoughtful reclaiming of both literature
and genre.”
—Brian Evenson
“Carmen Maria Machado is the way forward. Her fiction is fearlessly
inventive, socially astute, sometimes pointed, sometimes elliptical,
and never quite what you’re expecting—yet behind it you can always
hear that ancient tale-teller’s voice, bartering for your attention with
its dangers and its mysteries, its foolhardy characters pulled this way
and that by the ropes of their emotions. Which is to say simply this:
that there is at once the breath of the new about these stories and the
breath of the timeless.”
—Kevin Brockmeier
“With her lush, generative imagination, shimmering language, and
utter fearlessness, Carmen Maria Machado is surely one of the most
ferociously gifted young writers working today. … Hilariously
inventive, emotionally explosive, wonderfully sexy, Machado’s stories
will carry you far from home, upend your reality, and sew themselves
to your soul.”
—Michelle Huneven
“Carmen Maria Machado is amazing. A form-bending fabulist in the
tradition of Kevin Brockmeier, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell, she
gleefully seeks out weird shapes and subjects for every story. … She
writes uncanny, creepy, sexy, funny, feminist, magical-realist,
metafictional, pop-cultural, and all-of-the-above stories, and she
seems determined never to write the same story twice. Yet for all of
its wildly inventive variety, Her Body and Other Parties is unified by
the one story it keeps finding new ways to tell: how women can
survive in worlds that want them to disappear, whether into
marriage, motherhood, death, or (literally) prom dresses.”
—Bennett Sims
HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES
HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES
STORIES
Carmen Maria Machado
GRAYWOLF PRESS
Copyright © 2017 by Carmen Maria Machado
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only.
You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is
against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the
author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Excerpt from “Bipolar is Bored and Renames Itself” copyright © 2016 by Jacqui Germain.
Reprinted from When the Ghosts Came Ashore (Exploding Pinecone Press).
Excerpt from “God Should Have Made Girls Lethal” copyright © 2015 by Elisabeth Hewer.
Reprinted from Wishing for Birds (Platypus Press).
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota
State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts
and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support
has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Target, the McKnight
Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous
contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and
individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-788-7
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-980-5
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2017
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930115
Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design
For my grandfather
REINALDO PILAR MACHADO GORRIN,
quien me contó mis primeros cuentos, y sigue siendo mi favorito
and for
VAL
I turned around
and there you were