You will probably enjoy this book most if you appreciate more nebulous writing, with a focus on ideas and images rather than character or plot. It’s certainly an interesting book, and one which I would say is worth reading, even though I personally found much of it frustrating. My friend and I had mixed reactions to this critically adored collection of short stories. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction. 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 doppelgangers, 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. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |