Short stories by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."

Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Listing 12 stories.

A researcher delves into the story of a small town ravaged by unusual violence. When tigers massacred the townspeople and hoards of children disappeared into the woods — never to be seen again — the survivors of the event and the generations that came after seek answers and reflect on their history, as well as the prevalence of tigers in their culture and mythology.

A woman loses her glasses at a rest stop on the way to visit her girlfriend. She knows that her girlfriend will be furious if she is late, and that she cannot drive without her glasses, so she accepts help from a strange man who leads her down the highway and they begin to walk the rest of the way together.

After a school shooting, a teacher and her students struggle to process the trauma and constant fear of death lurking around the corner at any moment. The presence of death looming carries over into the teacher's personal life, including her book club and the friends who attend it.

After watching three of her sisters get bariatric surgery and transform their bodies, an unhappy woman decides to do the same. But the journey to thinness, happiness, and self-love is not exactly as straight as she thought.

An American woman tries to follow her sister to the land of the dead to tell her of their parents' demise.

When a lesbian couple moves into a haunted house whose lease they can't break, they must change their way of life to adapt to their eerie surroundings.

In a small American town beset by frequent disappearances of Dominican American girls that are ignored by police, a teenage girl explores her sexuality and experiences sexual harassment while she saves up to move to Chicago following the death of her father.

A young woman with a green ribbon tied permanently around her neck protects the ribbon from the endless pawing of her husband. As they raise their son, the risk of the ribbon unraveling increases.

In pre-WWII Paris, a mixed-race, lesbian girl works for room and board in a grotesque theater following her single mother's death. The lead actress, a sexually-submissive woman with an abusive boyfriend, takes her under her wing; however, she proves emotionally manipulative as the girl falls in love with her.

Two elderly sisters who have lived in near isolation finally leave their house and enter society after one sister is tricked by the king of their medieval kingdom into leaving their secluded palace. The king transforms one sister into a beautiful young woman, but the process goes terribly wrong when he attempts to beautify the other sister as well. As both sisters are tortured and ridiculed by the townspeople for the way that they look, they quickly regret their decision to ever leave the safety of their home and fall into despair at their equally botched transformations.