Carmen Maria Machado | Her Body and Other Parties

National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado and Vulture books editor Boris Kachka sit down to discuss “Her Body and Other Parties,” Machado’s debut collection of short stories that garnered her comparisons to Angela Carter and David Lynch. Buy a copy of “Her Body and Other Parties” here: https://www.strandbooks.com/index.cfm...

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.

Earthy 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. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Recorded May 16, 2018