Critter Chat: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Name: Critter Chat: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Start: 2026-05-27T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 1413 Eoff St, Wheeling, WV 26003-3554, United States

Schedule

Wed, 27 May, 2026 at 07:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

1413 Eoff St, Wheeling, WV 26003-3554, United States | Wheeling, WV

We realized this book was on a few of our lists, so we'll be talking about it in May! It's been out for quite a while, so should be easy to find. The audiobook is available for free on Hoopla with your library account.
These are short stories, so even if you're too busy this month to finish the whole book, you can read a story or two or three.
Reminder that we are meeting at Midge's Kitchen now. The entrance is on 15th St. behind St. Matthew's. You'll see a glass door that says "State Cellar" overhead. BYO-whatever, and we may have some snacks/beverages to share.
Description:
"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.
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."