This month Modern Latina Book Club will read Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
We are excited to be a part of The Center for Literary Arts featuring Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties in conversation with Linda Castillo, founder and executive editor of Modern Latina on Thursday, October 24, 2019 at MACLA, 510 S. 1st Street, San Jose at 7PM. The reading will be followed by an on-stage interview, plus an audience Q&A, book sale and signing. This event is free and open to the public.
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. 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. 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. The San Francisco Chronicle writes: “The book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body, and the realities of gender inequality make them so…These stories stand as exquisitely rendered, poignant hauntings.”
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”