Machado skillfully handles the introduction of these elements, pacing her stories in a way that destabilizes the reader’s sense of what’s real: just when the world seems comprehensible, the ground shifts beneath our feet, deepening and complicating our understanding of the characters, their motives, and their lives. Using twelve seasons’ worth of episode titles to guide the story, Machado transforms SVU into a tale of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. One of the collection’s boldest narratives, “Especially Heinous,” takes the long-running police procedural, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, as its point of departure, and brings familiar characters into altogether new and unusual territory. An altogether different affliction plagues the world of “Real Women Have Bodies:” women suddenly, inexplicably flicker out of existence, becoming incorporeal. The narrator’s chronicle of her romantic and erotic experiences becomes inextricable from her experience of the end of the world as we know it. The story “Inventory” at first seems to be a record of one woman’s sexual encounters, but as the narrative goes on, disaster creeps in: a deadly epidemic sweeps the United States, decimating its population.

Many of these stories take place in worlds much like ours, but their psychological realism is punctured by the fantastic, supernatural, and apocalyptic.

“The Resident,” an eerie tale of a writer’s experience at a residency gone wrong, tackles the problem of the “ madwoman in the attic,” and how some tropes limit our ability to write about mental illness and women’s emotional lives. In “The Husband Stitch,” a folktale about a girl whose head is held on by a ribbon (famously collected in Alvin Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room) becomes the basis for a story about misogyny, sexuality, and the values embedded in the stories we tell. The genre-bending stories collected in Her Body and Other Parties weave fables, urban legends, gothic literature, and popular culture to create moving narratives about female selfhood. These are only a few of the wonders contained in the pages of Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado’s electrifying debut. A phantasmagoric reimagining of one of television’s most popular shows. An inventory of lovers, written as the world falls apart.

‘Her Body and Other Parties’ by Carmen Maria MachadoĪ mysterious green ribbon around a woman’s neck.

Her body and other stories