The Midtown Scholar is pleased to welcome Carmen Maria Machado to Harrisburg! Carmen will discuss and sign copies of her new short-story collection, HER BODY AND OTHER PARTIES.

Photo Credit: Tom Storm Photography

About the book:

In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria 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 salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, 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.

About the author: 

Carmen Maria Machado’s work has appeared in Granta, the New Yorker, NPR, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Nebula Award and a Shirley Jackson Award, and was a finalist for the Calvino Prize. She lives in Philadelphia.