Advanced Praise for Her Body and Other Parties:
"The stories in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange. Her voracious imagination and extraordinary voice beautifully bind these stories about fading women and the end of the world and men who want more when they’ve been given and bodies, so many human bodies taking up space and straining the seams of skin in impossible, imperfect, unforgettable ways."
— Roxane Gay
"Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties tells ancient fables of eros and female metamorphosis in fantastically new ways. She draws the secret world of the body into visibility, and illuminates the dark woods of the psyche. In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.” — Karen Russell
"Carmen Maria Machado writes a new kind of fiction: brilliant, blindingly weird, and precisely attuned to the perils and sorrows of the times." — Ben Marcus
"Her Body and Other Parties will delight you, hurt you, and astonish you as only the smartest literature can. In this collection Machado blends horror, fairy tale, pop culture and myth in mesmerizing ways that feel utterly new. These stories are peerless and brilliant.” — Alissa Nutting
"Carmen Maria Machado has a vital, visceral, umbilical connection to the places deep within the soul from where stories emanate. With a tenderness that is both touching and terrifying, Her Body and Other Parties gives insight into a cluster of worlds linked by their depth of feeling and penetrating strangeness.” — Alexandra Kleeman
"Her Body and Other Parties is genius: part punk rock and part classical, with stories that are raw and devastating but also exquisitely plotted and full of delight. This is a strong, dangerous, and blisteringly honest book—it's hard to think of it as a 'debut,' it's that good." — Jeff VanderMeer
"Those of us who knew have been waiting for a Carmen Maria Machado collection for years. Her stories show us what we really love and fear." — Alexander Chee
"An astonishing and supple debut. Carmen Maria Machado shuffles together fantastic, realistic, popular, and literary genres and then deals winning hand after winning hand. Whether it is reworking fairy tales, rewriting the entire run of Law and Order into a grim fantasy, or diving into unchartered territory entirely Machado's own, Her Body and Other Parties is a deft and thoughtful reclaiming of both literature and genre." — Brian Evenson
"Carmen Maria Machado is the way forward. Her fiction is fearlessly inventive, socially astute, sometimes pointed, sometimes elliptical, and never quite what you're expecting—yet behind it you can always hear that ancient tale-teller's voice, bartering for your attention with its dangers and its mysteries, its foolhardy characters pulled this way and that by the ropes of their emotions. Which is to say simply this: that there is at once the breath of the new about these stories and the breath of the timeless." — Kevin Brockmeier
"Brilliantly inventive and blazingly smart, these stories have the life-and-death stakes of nightmares and fairy tales; they’re full of urgent, almost unbearable reality. Carmen Maria Machado is an extraordinary writer, an essential voice.” — Garth Greenwell
"Carmen Maria Machado is amazing. A form-bending fabulist in the tradition of Kevin Brockmeier, Kelly Link, and Karen Russell, she gleefully seeks out weird shapes and subjects for every story. She writes stories about ghosts, doppelgängers, and porno telepaths... She writes uncanny, creepy, sexy, funny, feminist, magical-realist, metafictional, pop-cultural, and all-of-the-above stories, and she seems determined never to write the same story twice. Yet for all of its wildly inventive variety, Her Body is unified by the one story it keeps finding new ways to tell: how women can survive in worlds that want them to disappear, whether into marriage, motherhood, death, or (literally) prom dresses." — Bennett Sims
"With her lush, generative imagination, shimmering language, and utter fearlessness, Carmen Maria Machado is surely one of most ferociously gifted young writers working today... Hilariously inventive, emotionally explosive, wonderfully sexy." — Michelle Huneven