Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Product Information

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-01-12 13:50:50 Associated-names Machado, Carmen Maria. Husband stitch; Machado, Carmen Maria. Inventory; Machado, Carmen Maria. Mothers; Machado, Carmen Maria. Especially henious; Machado, Carmen Maria. Real women have bodies; Machado, Carmen Maria. Eight bites; Machado, Carmen Maria. Resident; Machado, Carmen Maria. Difficult at parties Boxid IA40089309 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier A deeply feminist work from a queer perspective, using a variety of genres, literary tropes and cliches to tell women’s stories. Machado reimagines fairytales and urban legends to explore the ways these stories, and society at large, trap women with expectation. Imaginative, gripping, haunting, melancholic, and visceral.

The Resident" is about a woman who drives into the mountains to take part in a funded fellowship for writers and artists so she can finish her novel. The residency also happens to be on the same lake she attended Girls Scouts camp at. Of course, the woman will experience strange things. Of course, the reader will wonder if what she's experiencing is real or has some Meaning. Of course, I hated this. Her Body and Other Parties comes under the Genre of Short Stories because it is basically a collection of short stories. As is usually the case I adored some stories more than others but overall this was a very strong collection and I can absolutely understand the praise it has garnered (it has been blurbed by Roxane Gay and Jeff VanderMeer among others).

This is the first short story collection we’ve read in the book club! How do you feel about it? Did you like it better than our usual novels?

A story of a woman’s sex life as a plague destroys her world. Honestly, I don't even know what this was. Okay, I do; it’s an exploration of how sex alone can reflect an environment. There's this sort of raw quality to it, but I can't say it ever really got under my skin, and the character work could’ve been far stronger. The ribbon is not a secret; it’s just mine,” she responds. She tells him not to touch it, but during sex he pins her to the bed and takes the ribbon in his hands. While the first story is metaphorical, the second story is literally an "inventory", or a history, of the narrator's sexual partners and relationships. This entry to the collection is incredibly explicit, but woven into the stories, we learn of a world coming to a halt, and an apocalyptic reality setting into place thanks to an unstoppable disease. Machado builds up a lovely but inescapable sense of impending dread.If you think of works of fiction like works of art, Carmen Maria Machado's debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is an abstract painting. It's undoubtedly gorgeous and attention-getting, there's no one right way to interpret the things you see (or read), everyone will see something different in it, and each time you look, you'll catch something you didn't see the first time. You may also find yourself wondering, "What did that mean?" Favourite line? ‘Only then did I see the crystal outline of my past and future, conceive of what was above me (innumerable stars, incalculable space) and what was below me (miles of mindless dirt and stone.) From The Resident It's difficult to articulate without sounding like an idiot who's missed the point entirely, but there's something I find so depressing about the kind of writing that's ostensibly feminist but seems to focus incessantly on the negatives of being a woman. In fiction such as this, the approach is often paired with candid-yet-detached writing about sex that I also find offputting (not to mention extremely unsexy). The stories are well-crafted and (when they don't feel workshopped to death) spark with strong ideas and entertaining metafictional touches, but Her Body and Other Parties didn't work for me the way I hoped it would.

Novelist Kathleen Rooney, writing in The Chicago Tribune, wrote, "In her twistedly original and thrilling debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blends both the terrifying and the horrible into a psychologically realistic and darkly comic mixture." [13]urn:oclc:record:1134424860 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier herbodyotherpart0000mach_h8a1 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t28b1sn15 Invoice 1652 Isbn 155597788X Difficult At Parties" - about a woman trying to deal with the aftermath of sexual assault by watching porn - is another narrative that got right under my skin. However, just in general - and this can hardly be considered Machado's fault - I am growing a little tired of these feminist tales that hold such a grim definition of womanhood and femininity. Where we are painted as humans owned in parts by various men and corporations, where sex is cold and passionless, where we are seen to be masturbating furiously whenever our vaginas aren’t bleeding, which seems to be 80% of the time with all the hymens, birthing and, of course, menstruation. Maybe this is to make women seem harder, more brutal, less maternal and nurturing and cuddly and weak… but it’s a bleak alternative. Update: I do not think I was old enough to really get this when I read it (I was 16 and am now 20) so I would like to reread. For now, I will leave this as a four star, but I don't stand by this opinion, frankly.

Her Body and Other Parties is a collection of queer, feminist, horror short stories, that explore a number of common struggles and themes that plague our everyday lives as women. Using a variety of classic horror stories, urban legends, and contemporary shows, mixed with magical realism, fantasy, sci-fi, and dystopia, Machado writes of motherhood, femininity, societal expectations, and violence against both women's bodies and minds. It was strange, mesmerizing, haunting, and emotional, with riveting yet elegant prose. Eight Bites - Well I'm not quite sure, but I think this is about weight loss surgery and the sacrifice of thin and what it does to our daughters? It's rather frightening.

Carmen Maria Machado

Benson grows steadily unhinged over the course of “Especially Heinous,” but who could blame her? Isn’t that a logical reaction to a life of watching women get raped and murdered and avenged, in a world where we relax by watching a TV show about women getting raped and murdered and avenged?