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    Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
    Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
    Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
    Audiobook8 hours

    Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

    Written by Carmen Maria Machado

    Narrated by Amy Landon

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    Editor's Note

    Wonderfully weird…

    Machado’s collection of stories is so wonderfully weird. Genre-bending, uncanny, and often very funny, each of these unusual stories has something poignant to say about being a person and about being an artist.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 3, 2017
    ISBN9781681686899

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    Reviews for Her Body and Other Parties

    4/5

    837 ratings67 reviews

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    • 3/5
      What the- this was a read an odd and interesting read but some surprise were definitely better than kthwrs
    • 2/5
      It was a little more literary and creepy than I was in the mood for. The only story of the collection that I really liked was "The Husband Stitch." I couldn't finish "Especially Heinous."
    • 3/5
      There were some very lovely stories in this collection, including one that resonated mainly due to the COVID epidemic. What knocked it down a little was the SVU story, which was waaaay too long in my opinion. It took up half the book and I would have liked to read more lovely stories about women who struggle but try to survive.
    • 3/5
      I was loving this right up until the SUV story and then it tainted my view of the rest of the book. I think I would try this author again but maybe not a short story collection.
    • 2/5
      I really didn’t like not one of those shirt story
    • 5/5
      A very different type of horror for sure. I wasn’t too sure about it at the beginning but by the end I was hooked.
    • 4/5
      really amazing book, unfortunately i really hated the narrator’s voice
    • 1/5
      I couldn’t get passed the SVU part. I found what I had listened to be dull and confusing and just couldn’t get into it.
    • 3/5
      i really loved the second and fourth story!! in general this was probably the best short story collection ive read
    • 2/5
      Started out strong but eventually, I was totally lost and couldn’t tell when one story ended and a new one began, because nothing made sense
    • 4/5
      Interesting. Held my attention very well. I liked the way the narrator performed.
    • 3/5
      This book is absolutely immaculately written and full of wonderful and scintillating imagery. So why only three stars? Mostly because the stories aren’t especially narrative. Which is why I think so many people have issues finding when one story has ended and another has begun. I don’t think these are short stories, so much as flash fiction. If you don’t mind having no resolution, or maybe even a middle, then you can enjoy this a great deal. But if you want a more full bodies narrative, then you should skip this. But if you don’t mind just reading for the sake of enjoying pros and ideas then you should absolutely give this a shot.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Body-focused horror-tinged stories, most with sf (pandemic, not this one) or fantasy elements (women with ribbons around parts of their bodies that must never be undone, except of course that means the men in their lives demand the undoing). I wanted to say patriarchy-focused, but that’s not really true; it’s more that patriarchy is the air that the characters breathe, even when they know it—mostly they’re focused on surviving their individual situations, if that’s possible. I found the collection muchmore depressing than her memoir, which addresses similar situations and even provides versions of some of the scenes in these stories.
    • 4/5
      The stories in this collection sometimes defy description and often include sci-fi, horror and magic realist concepts, along with various experimental structures. Even with all these trappings, the writing makes them well worth reading; the author has a straightforward voice with viscerally grotesque descriptions. Most of the romantic/sexual relationships described are between women, and a focus on ordinary life and daily routines anchors the stories even with various fantastic conceits, which often illuminate the issues of women with their partners, the world and their own bodies.“The Husband Stitch” is a fantastic opener, describing a woman’s happy marriage and family with reference to well-known horror stories.“Inventory” was another good one–it’s a list of the narrator’s relationships as a pandemic grips America.“Mothers”, about a woman dealing with being a mother and remembering an abusive relationship, was the weakest story for me–still well written but not as focused.I loved “Especially Heinous” but can see that it would be a divisive story–it seems to be a description of the episodes of the TV show Law and Order: SVU (I have seen multiple seasons of the show, but this one would probably be less interesting if you’ve never watched it) but eventually starts telling its own story, a Gothic, labyrinthine one filled with ghosts, doppelgangers and possibly sentient cities.“Real Women Have Bodies” and “Eight Bites” are involving stories, even if the supernatural events in them are a bit on the nose.“The Resident” and “Difficult at Parties” are more grounded–the first is about a writer attending an artists’ retreat and the second is about a woman dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic experience–but they have an uncanny feel, like something is about the leap out of the shadows at any moment.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written, interesting perspectives, very timely. Loved it.
    • 5/5
      It took me two beers and twenty minutes in a dark room to be okay after reading this, it is that amazing.
    • 5/5
      This collection blew me away. The author crafted sentences that I read again and again. Her way of writing is so original and creative — like nothing I’ve read before. The stories were dark and haunting and so incredibly well-written. I savored them.
    • 3/5
      Best for:People who like a bit of sex with their short stories.In a nutshell:A collection of essays exploring womanhood.Worth quoting:‘ “Do you hate my body, Mom?” she says. Her voice splinters in pain, as if she were about to cry. “You hated yours, clearly, but mine looks just like yours used to, so—“ ‘Why I chose it:Recommended at my Book Spa appointment.Review:Some of these essays are intriguing. All are well written, but they aren’t quite what I was looking for in this book. It starts off strong, with an interesting exploration of a retelling of some urban legends. In the middle, the longest ‘essay,’ however, I basically skipped, as it was a paragraph about each episode of Law and Order SVU. I’m sure there’s something deep or interesting there that I missed, but I didn’t really get it. Another essay, about a writer at a writer’s retreat was engrossing. As I said, the essays are well-written, and I definitely got sucked into a couple of them. But the collection overall felt uneven to me, and there was a lot more sex in it than I’m looking for in most of my reading. Not looking for something chaste, and I know sex factors into a large part of life for many people, but I don’t really need it in every story I read. And to be fair, there was at least one essay I recall where sex isn’t the focus, and it’s one that I found to be really moving - about a woman considering weight loss surgery.Recommend to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:Donate it
    • 5/5
      Machado's stories are weird and wonderful, about women, about sexuality. They're the kind of surreal, untraditionally plotted stories that make you wonder what they mean.

      All the stories play with form in some way or another. Most are successful, but "Especially Heinous" is the weakest in this respect. It's set up as a list of fictional Law & Order: SVU summaries, and while there's a lot of good stuff in there, it doesn't quite stretch to the nearly 60 pages it takes.

      Usually in a short story collection I have to push myself towards the end--my attention span starts to lag. I read this in a day.
    • 4/5
      Generally, I don't read short stories, but this author's works was compared to Karen Russell whose work I enjoy. This wild compilation of eight stories is a debut collection although individually several have previously been published in periodicals. The two I enjoyed most were "The Husband Stitch" and "Inventory." The former involved a woman who before she was married had two rules for her dates: one, her sexual partner can not finish inside her and, two, he can not touch the green ribbon, which has been around her neck as long as she can remember." If this second rule is hauntedly familiar, you must have sitting around the same campfire with me. The second involved a biography of her life told from one sexual encounter to another including the context behind each. I loved her prose in this one which often seemed to me like poetry. Sometimes the climax of the story left me scratching my head, but even in those short stories, I thought her writing was some of the best I have read. If you are a fan of either reading or writing short stories, I would recommend this collection.
    • 5/5
      I found the writing to be subtle and brutal. I love suspense and mystery and each story was carried forward with a great unknown that the reader is left to parse and puzzle and finally empathize over. Of course, it was wonderful to read stories that are not mapped out by heteronormative structures, social or otherwise. This was a good queer read.
    • 4/5
      Amazing sensual stories about women and their bodies, tackling sex, but also weight, rape, pornography, and disease...no topic is off limits.
    • 3/5
      The title of this book caught my eye on the library shelf a while back, but I only went ahead and checked this out after the interesting and intriguing mess that was The Low, Low Woods.I'm usually not a fan of tone pieces with vague and confusing action and looming feelings of undefined dread, but this collection of literary horror short stories worked for me. Maybe it was all the LGBTQ+ characters and themes?I could have done, however, without a quarter of the pages being devoted to a weird Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode listing that veered from tribute to fan fiction to critique to bizarre X-Files homage? I've never seen an episode of any Law & Order shows, so now I guess I have an idea of what a normal person who has never watched Star Trek would feel if they come across a Kirk/Spock slash on the internet.
    • 5/5
      This book is excellently written and tackles the woman's body and mind space in inventive, genre-bending ways. I first heard of this book through the electrifying short story, "The Husband Stitch," but the whole collection is worth the read. Machado combines the gothic and queer in ways I never knew possible.
    • 3/5
      The good: This collection of short stories includes some beautifully detailed, character-driven writing and some fascinating fantasy and horror elements. The best stories were The Husband Stitch, The Resident, and Real Women Have Bodies. The Husband Stitch is fiercely feminist, and its voice evokes the trappings of oral storytelling in a really compelling way. The Resident was a detailed depiction of creativity, memory, and interpersonal relationships which felt novelistic in the character details included. Real Women Have Bodies had a really creative central idea, and the author's writing added beautifully to the creepy tone of the story. The bad: the stories were overwhelmingly negative, featuring characters that were at best wistful (with shades of self-delusion) and at worst miserable and poisonous. A variety of feminist themes were explored, but the negative and misery pervading the stories made the analysis seem shallower, and I had to take long breaks between the stories in the volume. The ugly: Especially Heinous is a weird Law&Order SVU fanfiction which spans over 50 pages. It's poetic and surreal and bitingly satirical but I just could not force myself to finish it. Maybe I could have handled 5 or 10 pages of twisted L&O SVU anti-fanfic, but 50??? No. Give yourself permission to skip this one.
    • 5/5
      Dark, relavant, and compelling short stories. I could not read this book in one sitting, because I needed to process the stories as I went along. I skipped a couple that didn't catch my attention as much. The Husband Stitch and Eight Bites resonate particularly with me, and I will be thinking about those for a long time. One a commentary on secrets we keep to preserve ourselves, and the other how we treat our bodies and love, or not love, our true selves.

      Oh my--trying to describe Eight Bites to my daughter had me tearing up, and I could hardly talk.

      So--five stars for the ones I loved.
    • 5/5
      A vivid, incredible collection. After each story I thought "this is my favorite," but then the next happened; however, "Mothers" and "The Resident" particularly stand out.
    • 5/5
      Very smart and very sharp. Haunting, disturbing, riveting, excellent.
    • 4/5
      When people do things that are really different, really dazzling, elements are not going work. Same old same old is easy to do well and consistently, but innovation requires failure. This book is like nothing I have ever read, and parts of it are in fact dazzling, and also emotionally affecting, sad, hilarious, and deeply unsettling (this is mostly horror) but parts are also over-the-top, and ludicrous, and in the case of the Law & Order SVU section, wildly overlong (at least 3x the length that section should have been IMO.) Absolutely worth reading, a really compelling new voice. I have Machado's memoir of an abusive relationship, In the Dreamhouse, on my short TBR list, and am really looking forward to that one.
    • 5/5
      Creepy, feminist, vaguely sci-fi stories that really got under my skin. The stories even have a sense of humor, like when a character is described as being "difficult at parties." Machado has a lot of lines like that which perfectly capture some everyday human experience. Those details bring the reader into the strange little worlds of each story.