Her Body and Other Parties

Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, 245 pages

In her debut collection of short stories (and one novella), Machado presents us with haunting and slightly supernatural tales of women and their inner thoughts. The stories range from a writer at a creepy artists' colony to a sales clerk that discovers something disturbing in the dresses at work to a LONG story inspired by the actual episode titles of Law and Order: SVU. My favorite, however, was the first one: "The Husband Stitch," which uses the scary stories and urban legends I grew up with to create the story of one woman's life. These stories are inventive and unsettling, and something about them reminds me of George Saunders and Kelly Link (though perhaps a bit more somber).