Love’s myriad forms

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction, erotica, fable and horror. In these electric stories, the author explores the challenges and promises of women’s bodies with forceful verve.

In ‘Real Women Have Bodies’, a mysterious illness makes women gradually fade away; many of them ask a seamstress to stitch their disappearing bodies into the fabric of dresses. In ‘The Husband Stitch’, a woman gives herself completely to her husband and son, insisting only that they never touch the ribbon she always wears around her neck. When this tiny privacy is not permitted, we see just how much unravels. ‘Eight Bites’ shows a large woman following her sisters in undergoing bariatric surgery to curb her appetite: ‘They ordered large meals and then said, “I couldn’t possibly”… that bashful lie had been converted into truth vis-à-vis a medical procedure.’ Although the collection is a little uneven, the best of these stories — with resonant imaginative worlds and intelligent riffs on a woman’s place — are spellbinding.