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. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. 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.
A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. 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.
Earthy 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. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
Add to your library to track progress and write reviews
Find Her Body and Other Parties: Stories Carmen Maria Machado in PDF, EPUB, ebook, audiobook, print, or library editions.
3 books in catalog
Blending speculative fiction, body horror, and fairy-tale tropes with contemporary queer realism, short fiction and non-fiction narratives have reshaped expectations surrounding form and genre boundaries. Carmen Maria Machado gained widespread critical acclaim with her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, which reimagined women's bodily autonomy, sexuality, and trauma through surreal and gothic lenses.
Machado further expanded her literary footprint with In the Dream House, an inventive memoir that uses various narrative tropes and pop-culture mechanisms to depict an abusive same-sex relationship, earning major honours across fiction, non-fiction, and genre communities.
Born on July 3, 1986, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Machado developed an early passion for imaginative literature and storytelling. She completed her undergraduate studies at American University before earning her Master of Fine Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2012, while also attending the Clarion Workshop that same year. Her paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Cuba, a heritage that informed her cultural awareness alongside her immersion in speculative traditions.
Over the course of her career, Machado has served as a faculty member teaching creative writing and speculative fiction at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has received numerous prominent awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 2019. Alongside her prose collections and essays, she expanded into sequential art by writing the six-issue graphic novel series The Low, Low Woods for DC Comics' Hill House Comics imprint.
Machado's writing style is noted for its formal experimentation, blending fabulism, science fiction, gothic horror, and memoir. In her short fiction, such as her widely anthologized story 'The Husband Stitch', she repurposes urban legends and folklore to explore systemic violence, female agency, and physical vulnerability. She frequently addresses themes of queer identity, desire, bodily autonomy, and psychological trauma, refusing rigid boundaries between literary and speculative fiction.
In her non-fiction, particularly her memoir, Machado utilizes tropes from distinct literary modes—ranging from haunted house motifs and choose-your-own-adventure formats to film tropes and procedural structures—to articulate domestic abuse within LGBTQ+ relationships. This structural innovation allows her to interrogate historical gaps in queer archival history while maintaining emotional urgency and analytical precision.
