Pretty Eye Surgery 013
List 059
Moms 077
Particularly Heinous Crimes _ A Review of Episode 272 of "Law & Order: Sex Crimes Unit" 109
Real Women Have Bodies 201
Eight mouths 239
Resident Writer 271
Embarrassing Person at a Party 347

Acknowledgments 383
Translator's Note 387

Recommended by novelist Son Bo-mi and Cheon Seon-ran!
Shirley Jackson Award winner, National Book Award finalist (2017)

Stories that vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality, and eccentricity.
_Roxane Gay

The first short story, "Pretty Surgery," features a woman with a green ribbon around her neck.
Honest about her desires and eager to make important life choices for herself, she first covets the man she likes and then teaches him “what I want, what flickers between my eyelids as I sleep.”
Throughout their lives together, dating, getting married, having children, and raising them, she gives everything to the man, but she forbids him from touching one thing: a ribbon.
The husband gets angry at the woman who doesn't say anything about the ribbon, saying, "Why do you want to hide that from me?", but the woman replies, "I'm not hiding it.
He simply replies, “This is not yours.”
In this short story, the woman tells the reader various stories, but unlike her who happily enjoys physical pleasure, the women in the stories always meet miserable endings.
Park your car on a remote lakeside, have sex with a hook-handed killer, cook your own liver for your husband, and go to a graveyard alone in the middle of the night to prove your courage.
And as the protagonist's ribbon comes to symbolize desire, invasion, and control, even she, who seemed to have led a proactive life, eventually faces an inevitable catastrophe.


Machado's novels focus on sex and death, a theme that becomes even more evident in the apocalyptic "List" and "Real Women Have Bodies."
"The Lists" lists every man and woman a woman has had sexual relations with, from her childhood to the present day, when the world is being destroyed by a virus.
The virus is transmitted through physical contact, but because the vulnerable body is also a source of joy, the protagonist continues to search for someone to share his body and soul with.
If in "The Lists" the end comes equally to everyone, in "Real Women Have Bodies" it is only women, and especially those presumed to be queer, who face extinction.
From one day on, the women's bodies gradually become transparent, and eventually their forms disappear completely, and the only way to exist in this world is to have their transparent bodies sewn into dresses.
While men and cisgender women, who are not subject to extinction, continue their daily lives oblivious to this reality, the protagonist watches helplessly as his girlfriend Petra slowly disappears right next to him.

"A Particularly Heinous Crime," the longest of the eight short stories, is also the most formally experimental.
The author features Benson and Stabler, the two main characters from the TV drama Law & Order: Sexual Assault Unit, in the novel, but rewrites the story in a way that is reminiscent of the titles of the 300 episodes alone.
As in the drama, in the novel, incidents of women being assaulted, raped, and murdered continue to occur, and as readers read this short story, they are led to think about ourselves as viewers who take these incidents for granted and dramatize them into reality.


How women live in this world,
The most powerful and original voice on how the world treats women.

The women in Machado's novels are largely queer, occasionally see ghosts, and routinely encounter fear and violence, both real and surreal.
A victim of a suspected sexual assault becomes able to read the minds of porn stars ("The Embarrassing Person at the Party"), a female detective is visited by ghosts with two small brass bells dangling from her eyelids ("A Particularly Heinous Crime"), and a slimmed-down woman discovers parts of herself missing from her home after undergoing bariatric surgery and locks them in the basement ("Eight Mouths").


These novels, which are difficult to define as a single genre such as science fiction, horror, dystopia, fantasy, or fable, “come together and mix like raindrops falling on a pond” to create a common emotion and atmosphere.
And at its foundation lies the author's keen insight into the depths of women's experiences accumulated over centuries.
The author thoroughly explores what women desire and fear, or what they desire despite their fear, and completely dismantles the rigid and internalized notions of women, presenting them anew in his own unique language.
In this way, this book, "Her Body and the Party of Others," vividly presents to the world the most powerful and original voice on how women live in this world and how the world treats them.

〔 Recommendation 〕

Through these formally masterful and emotionally charged fragments, Machado gives substance and form to the memories, longings, and desires of women.
Karen Russell

Machado's writing is full of the suppressed physical energy and raw anger of a woman who has been annihilated.
The female body is the subject, the perpetrator, and the innocent.
The short stories contained here were amusing, and that made me uncomfortable, because in my laughter I heard the same sound as the whining of a small dog under threat.
Louis Erdrich

Original and vivid stories that suddenly appeared.
Filled with bizarre myths that capture familiar but unspoken truths about being a woman, this book tells a story that realism fails to deliver. NPR

A wild work covered in spangles and scales. Drawing from science fiction, queer theory, and horror fiction, this collection is ablaze with the influence of storytellers from Angela Carter to Kelly Link to Helen Oyeyemi.
It's been a while since a debut work by a relatively unknown author has garnered this much attention, and it deserves even more.

The New York Times

The author's vivid and experimental lens through which she portrays women struggling to gain power is remarkable.
New Yorker

Machado's novel, which features elements of science fiction and fantasy, depicts the unbelievable realities of being a woman in a way the author herself never expected. NBC

With an absurdly brilliant talent, he condenses and writes about moments that are extremely important but were previously scattered here and there.
The author shows how original, subversive, energetic, and joyful a story can be when it comes from the depths of the heart, even if it comes from a broken heart, or especially because it comes from such a heart.
Los Angeles Times

The texture of the sentences feels so vivid that I want to rub them with my fingers.
This book, permeated by a powerful feminism, tells the story of a woman's body engaged in a struggle against sex, power, pleasure, pain, and self-loathing.
Machado achieved great alchemy by combining disparate and conflicting elements.
The Boston Globe

Although it's full of fantasy-like premises, the realities of sexual desire, the malleability of the body, and gender inequality make the fantasy feel like real reality.
San Francisco Chronicle

In this twisted, original, and enchanting debut collection, the author combines a chilling and terrifying tale with psychological realism and dark comedy.
These stories, hot and cool at the same time, will leave readers on their feet.
Chicago Tribune