Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

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First, I tell him fairy tales – the very oldest ones, with the pain and death and forced marriage pared away like dead foliage. Outside the window, the children play – knocking each other off the playground equipment, popping the heads off dandelions. And then it had me thinking - is this symptomatic of we are 'supposed' to think about relationships? They have beautiful, bold bodies; they are full of contradictions; they come in all shapes, sexual orientations, and sizes; they are hetero, queer, sexually hungry, strong.

It’s also the title of the standout story in Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection, a finalist in last year’s US National Book awards: a tense, seductive fairytale about rumour and silence, sex and power, autonomy and being ignored.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and In the Dream House, which was the winner of the Rathbones Folio Prize. Machado's bold and unapologetic prose presents a stunning exploration of desire, love, and the haunting presence of societal expectations. As the love story between our heroine and Petra, the dressmaker’s daughter, unfolds, the plague goes from a gone-viral horror on the Internet, through a major topic of TV News coverage, to something real and deeply personal. I am not even certain how such a thing would happen, but the possibilities incense me to near madness. She tells him not to touch it, but during sex he pins her to the bed and takes the ribbon in his hands.

Most importantly, my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of evidence, why did no one notice the toes except for you? He is quiet for so long that I think that he’s fallen asleep, but when I look over his eyes are open and fixed on the ceiling.Afterward, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me that no one was having any luck developing a vaccine. Among the narrator’s concerns is that her experience will be reduced to a trope: “Perhaps,” she says, “you’re thinking that I’m a cliché—a weak, trembling thing with a silly root of adolescent trauma, straight out of a gothic novel.

Find your next must-read with the Serpent’s Tail newsletter and discover gripping crime and mystery from Viper Books. I am fascinated and aroused by the rhythm, the concrete sense of his need, the clarity of his release. With her groundbreaking debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties, Machado has carved a rightful place in contemporary literature and established herself as a powerful force in the literary world. Then her face slips somewhere else for a moment, as if she has dipped beneath the surface of a lake. We stopped for a while, somewhere near Pennsylvania, but the virus caught up with us when we crossed paths with another group.

When my husband goes to sleep that night, he does so with a hot and burning anger that falls away only when he starts dreaming.