Her Body and Other Parties

Description:

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria 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 naively assumeded had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.

subjects: Women,  Fiction,  Fiction, short stories (single author),  Horror fiction,  Short stories,  Feminism,  LGBTQ short stories,  Lambda Literary Awards,  Lambda Literary Award Winner,  Identity,  Man-woman relationships,  Sexual minorities,  Science Fiction,  General,  Short Stories (single author),  Libido,  Lesbian characters,  Horror,  Fantasy,  Queer,  LGBT,  Magical Realism,  Contemporary,  Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction Finalist,  collection:edmund_white_award=finalist,  collection:otherwise_tiptree_award=honor