Machado’s stories, appearing in such magazines as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Granta, and Tin House, had blown readers away. Of course, overnight acclaim is not really sudden. On Saturday afternoon Machado would take part in both a reading by the fiction honorees and a panel on writing and identity. After the November 15th National Book Foundation’s awards ceremony in New York, all of the winners and finalists in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature came to Miami for a Friday evening celebration at the Book Fair. Her first book, the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, was published by Graywolf Press in October, accompanied by raves from established writers from all parts of the galaxy of fiction, and was chosen as a National Book Award finalist. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.Carmen Maria Machado came to the Miami Book Fair last November surrounded by the buzz of the book world. 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 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. 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. 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. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. 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.
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