I want to first start by saying that I’m on the fence about short stories. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.Ī wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. This collection has been nominated for numerous awards and was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (2018). In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is a collection of short stories, many of which contain an air of horror, but all of which have a feminist thread through them. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Įarthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism.

Carmen maria machado green ribbon