Her Body And Other Parties

Download or read book Her Body and Other Parties written by Carmen Maria Machado and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “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 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.

Download or read book In the Dream House written by Carmen Maria Machado and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Download or read book Show Them a Good Time written by Nicole Flattery and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-01-28 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Show Them a Good Time is a master class in the short story-bold, irreverent and agonizingly funny." Sally Rooney, Author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends Show Them a Good Time tells the stories of women slotted away into restrictive roles: the celebrity's girlfriend, the widower's second wife, the lecherous professor's student, the corporate employee. But these women are too intelligent, too ferociously mordant and painfully funny to remain in their places. In "Not the End Yet,” Flattery probes the hilarious and wrenching ambivalence of Internet dating as the apocalypse nears; in "Sweet Talk,” the mysterious disappearance of local women sets the scene for a young girl to confront the dangerous uncertainties of her own sexuality; in "Abortion, A Love Story,” two college students in a dystopian campus reconfigure the perilous stories of their bodies in a fraught academic culture to offer a subversive play that takes over their own offstage lives. Together, the stories in Show Them a Good Time provide a riveting, hilarious introduction to one of today's most original young writers.

Download or read book Awayland written by Ramona Ausubel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inventive story collection that spans the globe as it explores love, childhood, and parenthood with an electric mix of humor and emotion. Acclaimed for the grace, wit, and magic of her novels, Ramona Ausubel introduces us to a geography both fantastic and familiar in eleven new stories, some of them previously published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Elegantly structured, these stories span the globe and beyond, from small-town America and sunny Caribbean islands to the Arctic Ocean and the very gates of Heaven itself. And though some of the stories are steeped in mythology, they remain grounded in universal experiences: loss of identity, leaving home, parenthood, joy, and longing. Crisscrossing the pages of Awayland are travelers and expats, shadows and ghosts. A girl watches as her homesick mother slowly dissolves into literal mist. The mayor of a small Midwestern town offers a strange prize, for stranger reasons, to the parents of any baby born on Lenin's birthday. A chef bound for Mars begins an even more treacherous journey much closer to home. And a lonely heart searches for love online--never mind that he's a Cyclops. With her signature tenderness, Ramona Ausubel applies a mapmaker's eye to landscapes both real and imagined, all the while providing a keen guide to the wild, uncharted terrain of the human heart.

Download or read book Gibberish written by Young Vo and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BEST OF THE YEAR Kirkus · Parents · Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association · Chicago Public Library · Washington Post · Evanston Public Library · Los Angeles Public Library Charlotte Huck Recommended Book Common Sense Media Selection It’s Dat’s first day of school in a new country! Dat and his Mah made a long journey to get here, and Dat doesn’t know the language. To Dat, everything everybody says — from the school bus driver to his new classmates — sounds like gibberish. How is Dat going to make new friends if they can’t understand each other? Luckily there’s a friendly girl in Dat’s class who knows that there are other ways to communicate, besides just talking. Could she help make sense of the gibberish? P R A I S E “A superb picture book.” —The Wall Street Journal “Masterly. A tender reflection.” —The New York Times ★ “The execution is stellar. A visually and emotionally immersive immigration story.” —Kirkus (starred) ★ “Delightful. Beginning readers will love this book as the illustrations say it all.” —School Library Connection (starred) ★ “Will give hope to kids dealing with a new country and could inspire others to reach out to struggling immigrant children.” —Booklist (starred)

Download or read book In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories written by Alvin Schwartz and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 1985-10-02 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creak... Crash... BOO! Shivering skeletons, ghostly pirates, chattering corpses, and haunted graveyards...all to chill your bones! Share these seven spine-tingling stories in a dark, dark room.

Download or read book Beach Read written by Emily Henry and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION! "Original, sparkling bright, and layered with feeling."--Sally Thorne, author of The Hating Game A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters. Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. They're polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block. Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She'll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he'll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.