Her Body and Other Parties

Stories

By: Carmen Maria Machado

Narrated by: Amy Landon

Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2017 Carmen Maria Machado (P)2017 HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books

Didn’t get it

I couldn’t get the point of the book.
For me it seems like a person writing the diet think that ame into her mind.!

Horror Masterpiece

Absolutely in love with this short story collection. Carmen Maria Machado has a uniquely queer and feminine perspective on terror. The books says a lot about what it is to be a woman in our society and the inherent horror in that reality. At times it felt like this book was written just for me. It spoke so directly and frankly to my experiences that I could not help but be enthralled. I highly recommend.

... meh

I usually like short stories but this one has too much magical realism for my liking. The SVU portion in particular I found to be really confusing. I enjoyed a few of the other stories, I don’t want to give away spoilers so I’ll just leave it at that.

From a narration standpoint, the stories all run together. The new chapters are never signified so it can be really confusing. The woman’s voice was also a bit dry.

A new favorite collection

Beautiful, intoxicating writing, a sense of unreality. Loved these stories and their worlds. Amazing narration.

Desperately needs pauses between stories.

For some reason there aren't even short pauses between stories. Seems like a huge oversight. Because of the surreal nature of some parts of this book, the lack of delineation between chapters makes it extremely confusing to figure out where one story ends and the next one begins. Not in a good way. There are longer pauses within each story than there are between the stories. I feel like I didn't get a chance to appreciate the ending of each section because it took me a few minutes to even realize I had started a new chapter.

Otherwise I enjoyed this book. Kind of weird. In a good way.

I recommend looking up the titles of all the stories in this book so you can listen for the title of the next one, thereby getting some small indication that you're moving to the next story in the collection.

Beautiful

Poignant and heartbreakingly accurate fiction. Good read if you're a woman and feel like nobody understands you... Machado reaches down into every cobwebbed corner of the female experience and closely examines what she finds.

Just phenomenal

This is some of the best weird fiction/horror-adjacent work I've read in a while. Stories that have something to say and say it masterfully, with all the subtlety and grace you could hope for. Interesting explorations of form and character that plant one foot firmly in the literary fiction realm while the other foot roams the halls of psychological horror.

The entire collection is worth it for the first story alone, "The Husband Stitch" which is a deeply moving and effective subversion of a well-known spooky story.

Do yourself a favor and pick this one up.

narrator saying wrong words

The book is great, awesome pieces. The narrator reading the book is missing several words. Just now I herd her say "cardboard" when the word in the actual, physical book is "cupboard" there have been a few other strange deviations from the written book, and in a highly conceptual set of stories like this those differences can have serious consequences for the reader/ listener experience. Accuracy to the written work is very very important and I find it strange these deviations were allowed and not edited or removed etc.

No chapter titles??

I may have been able to enjoy this book and it’s bizarre writing had each chapter/short story was broken up into chapters. I would be listening to a story and it would just begin the next one and I didn’t quite understand if it was the same story or a new one.

Good Read

The stories I liked best were: The Husband Stich, Real Women Have Bodies, The Resident and Difficult At Parties.