Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Product Information

What does it mean to present a face of one’s community that isn’t commonly seen, and that might be seen as bad PR?

He touched my face when we fucked and said I was beautiful, and I jerked my head a little to dislodge his fingers.Our son enters school when he is five, and I remember his teacher from that day in the park, when she had crouched to help me. This not-so-subtle wink screams, ‘If you can’t join them, beat them,’ and in this story, Machado beats stereotypes to the ground by charging them head on. When they went to sleep, the old woman heard the front door open, and a thin wail wafted through the rooms. In Machado’s world, this story becomes something more as she adds an incurable plague sweeping across America that, through means no one understands, makes women fade into silent, sentient, incorporeality. I tell her that we have had no more children since our son, and now that he has started school, my days will be altered toward sloth and boredom.

Share your thoughts on Her Body and Other Parties in the comments section below, and be sure to RSVP for our upcoming live discussion event with Carmen Maria Machado. She chewed on her lip, and the pot of coffee tipped in her hand, dripping tiny brown dots onto the linoleum. If you are reading this story out loud, you may be wondering if that place my ribbon protected was wet with blood and openings, or smooth and neutered like the nexus between the legs of a doll.Her hair grayed at the temples and the way she laughed tripped pleasure down the stairs of my heart. Mostly it seems that women are falling victim to an unavoidable fate which leads me to think that this is a metaphor for America’s rape culture and normalisation of misogyny. If you are reading this story out loud, move aside the curtain to illustrate this final point to your listeners.

We had sex in his car because he had roommates and I couldn’t be in my house right then, and he slid his hand inside my bra and his hands were perfect, fucking perfect, and we fell into the too-tiny backseat.

asks the annoying antagonist of “The Resident,” a Victorian-inflected horror story about an artist’s residency in the Catskills. She becomes concerned with being unoriginal, turning into 'the madwoman in the attic', and grapples with judgements of her identity, both from the past as well as the present. My body changes in ways I do not expect – my breasts are large, swollen and hot, my stomach lined with pale marks, the inverse of a tiger’s. In this essay, I refer to Emmanuel Levinas’s work on ethics, Maurice Blanchot’s writings on the relation between literature and ethics, and Jacques Derrida’s account of haunting to argue that the stories not only demonstrate that any text is made through what is missing, absent or different, but that they also establish an ethical relation with the reader based on shared vulnerability and uncertainty.

As the ghost of what she had cut out of herself takes on a physical form she finds herself deeply angry with it. Shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award, the collection is held together by themes of desire, horror, and grief.Eventually, the narrator allows her ribbon to be untied, and the consequences that follow are life changing. I’m still not sure if I was with her because I wanted to be or because I was afraid of what the world was catching all around us. And the sensation of fins splitting to feet being anything less than agonizing he rejects outright after cutting his hand with a pair of scissors. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, a Shirley Jackson Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize.