Out of all of the stories, this was the toughest for me to rate, because I felt like it could be interpreted so many different ways, and I found myself second-guessing what it meant to me. Our narrator, a dress shop employee, lives in a world where women keep disappearing. They don't vanish into thin air; instead, they simply wake up one day to find their bodies fading, until they become translucent, and then are gone for good. At first, I believed it to be a commentary on society's expectations of women in general, but at one point, the story explains that women are fading younger and younger, and suddenly, I was reading a story about a world in which women lose their value as they lose their youth, and their worth is "lost" earlier with each passing generation. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Eight Bites - Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts". texas.gulfcoastmag.org . Retrieved 2019-08-13. With the beginning of the narrative comes the introduction of the first-person narrator who remains unnamed throughout the story—in fact, every character in this story goes unnamed. The narrative... Eight Bites" is about a woman's relationship with food and her fat self as she considers and then gets bariatric surgery. Machado's evocative writing really worked when delving into a food/body obsession.

Then there's the much-discussed and multi-award-nominated 'The Husband Stitch', a modern fable which updates the campfire tale 'The Green Ribbon'. Like the original, it is a horror story with a gruesome twist, but the true horrors here are ordinary ones: the husband's insistence that the wife have nothing of her own; the titular stitch itself. In striving for a fairytale flavour, Machado uses a mannered voice that renders her narrator smug and oddly prudish even as she recounts exhausting quantities of sex (a recurring motif, as you may already have guessed). I did enjoy her wry stage directions: 'If you are reading this story out loud, move aside the curtain to illustrate this final point to your listeners. It'll be raining, I promise.' This is a strong and overtly feminist tale that takes a very dim view of men generally: men are thoughtlessly manipulative and dismissive of women's feelings. Even a strong-willed woman, like our narrator, can get worn down by it over time. The stronger your feminist leanings, the more likely you are to appreciate this story. It's free online at Granta.com. Her Body and Other Parties was written in the English language and was published in the United States.

If you think of works of fiction like works of art, Carmen Maria Machado's debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, is an abstract painting. It's undoubtedly gorgeous and attention-getting, there's no one right way to interpret the things you see (or read), everyone will see something different in it, and each time you look, you'll catch something you didn't see the first time. You may also find yourself wondering, "What did that mean?" I feel my jaw tighten, and my hand fondles my bow involuntarily. My mind skips between many answers, and I settle on the one that brings me the least amount of anger.” Here, Machado is riffing off a heaving, seething mass of tales: not just that old horror story “ The Green Ribbon,” but also an urban legend about a hook-handed man, a folk tale about a feral girl raised by wolves, a fairy tale about a woman who cuts out her own liver to feed her husband. The story that gives “The Husband Stitch” its title, though, is true: It refers to what happens when an obstetrician adds an extra stitch to his repair of the vaginal opening after an episiotomy, to heighten the pleasure of a male partner during sex. The entitlement Machado is describing, the sense that it is fine to treat women’s bodies primarily as objects for someone else’s gratification, is not confined to the realm of fiction. Trigger/Content Warnings: childbirth, death, sexual content, misogyny, sexual assault, deadly virus/epidemic, domestic abuse, murder, sexual assault of a minor, suicide, blood, Gore, incest, kidnapping, fatphobia, animal death, body horror, vomit

That’s the problem, isn’t it? A woman’s body never exists in isolation. There is always her body, and there are also always all those other parties who believe they are entitled to it. Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Ellie Robbins described Machado's collection as "that hallowed thing: an example of almost preposterous talent that also encapsulates something vital but previously diffuse about the moment." [15] Robbins concluded her review by praising the author, "In 'Her Body and Other Parties,' Machado reveals just how original, subversive, proud and joyful it can be to write from deep in the gut, even — especially — if the gut has been bruised." [15] Stories [ edit ] "The Husband Stitch" [ edit ] The third entry begins with our narrator being handed a baby created by herself and her former female lover, and frankly, beyond this point, the rest of the story is a combination of beautiful, poetic narrative, and absolute chaos in the form of one of the most genuinely unreliable narrators I've ever read. If you enjoy unreliable narration and being left to piece things together for yourself, this will be right up your alley, but it was just a little too blurry and grey of an ending for my taste. One thing I will give Machado the utmost credit for in this story, though, is the incredible way she writes an abusive relationship. There were so many lines that were brutally familiar, but so cathartic, because they felt so raw and genuinely. Her Body and Other Parties is a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, and it is truly the debut of a dazzling, fearless new voice in the world of short stories. While I wish I could talk to someone about what they think happened in some of the stories, I honestly can't stop thinking about the worlds Machado created, and how masterfully she reeled me into them. One man. No more than twenty, floppy brown hair. He’d been on foot for a month. He looked like you’d expect: skittish. No hope. When we had sex, he was reverent and too gentle. After we cleaned up, I fed him canned soup. He told me about how he walked through Chicago, actually through it, and how they had stopped bothering to dispose of the bodies after a while. He had to refill his glass before he talked about it further. “After that,” he said, “I went around the cities.” I asked him how far behind the virus was, really, and he said he did not know. “It’s really quiet here,” he said, by way of changing the subject. “No traffic,” I explained. “No tourists.” He cried and cried and I held him until he fell asleep. The next morning, I woke up and he was gone.Her Body and Other Parties' gives shape to female stories". The Stanford Daily. 2019-02-04 . Retrieved 2022-04-01.

Feminism: 5/5 again. She uses the ribbon as an allegory for what it is to be female in society and how scary that is but also just, a fact of life? And she doesn't trash talk the men while she does this which is really impressive. Eight Bites - Well I'm not quite sure, but I think this is about weight loss surgery and the sacrifice of thin and what it does to our daughters? It's rather frightening. As a bonus Carmen Marie Machado story worth a read: The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror Arabic / Brazilian / Catalan / Chinese / Dutch / Finnish / French / German / Hungarian / Italian / Japanese / Korean /Norwegian / Polish / Portuguese / Romanian / Russian / Serbian / Spanish / Swedish / Taiwanese / Turkish / UkrainianWhat’s your favorite story in the collection? Least favorite? I generally think “Difficult at Parties” is the weakest, but I can be convinced otherwise. It is sometimes very strange how sex and coming are the most important things in scenes where it seems like far more important things are happening. It made it especially difficult to read through "Inventory", which is little more than a repetitive listing of unsexy sex throughout a woman's life. this is a brilliant work by a brilliant author, and it's greater than the sum of its parts. i didn't miss a single day (despite having work and holidays and cross-country flights in that time), and not only that, but i looked forward to my time with this every day. There’s been some critical debate over whether Her Body is playing more with fairy tales or urban legends. Do you think the distinction is meaningful? Where do you fall? I just now finished the rest... some were even harder to wrap my head around. These are literary - kinda brilliant- short stories-which a classroom discussion could enhance.