RaveThe New York Journal of BooksCarmen Maria Machado’s debut collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is compelling, gloriously weird, and, though some of the narrators are occasionally deeply frightened, the stories collected are nothing less than fearless. Genre and gender bending, erudite and steamy, Machado’s stories manage to defy expectation and be compulsively readable ...dark and fabulous tales, hypnotic and throbbing, stories that somehow both celebrate female sexuality and yet make the reader constantly uncomfortable, voyeurs peering too close at another’s desperate intimacy ...they launch the reader into a realm rarely seen in fiction, and the journey, at times discomfiting, is always exhilarating.
