September 2018 Book of the Month
Her Body And Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Published by: GRAYWOLF PRESS
ISBN-10: 155597788X
ISBN-13: 978-1555977887
SYNOPSIS:
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.
BIO:
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Kirkus Prize, LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the World Fantasy Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, 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, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife. https://carmenmariamachado.com/
September 2018 Conversations Book
The Spectacle of Let: The Oliet & Obit
by Samuel Zamarripa
Published by: Floricanto Press
ISBN-10: 154637079X
ISBN-13: 978-1546370796
SYNOPSIS:
Open Samuel Zamarripa’s debut novel, The Spectacle of Let – the Oliet and Obit, and embark on a literary journey through the imaginative work of his protagonist, Otto Cristóbal Almeida, and his mysterious manuscript, The Voice of the Looking Mountains, a book within a book. Almeida has a fantastic story to tell about Creation and the first spoken word of God. It is a tale spun from the boundless stories of his numinous paramour, Niva Miramontes, who speaks with uncommon conviction. “In the beginning,” she insists, “God said ‘Let,’ and the rest is just a spectacle.” From a mysterious monastery in Veracruz, Mexico, to an overnight cruise on the majestic Hudson River, Miramontes reveals her heavenly gift of parable. Weaving together the generational saga of the Portuondo family—their salacious past and their journey to redemption—Niva’s tales captivate Otto. Overwhelmed by Niva’s spellbinding words, Otto falls into the clutches of an Oliet—a dream’s dream, a place where fiction invades life, yielding truth of a different kind. His book languishes and finally lands on the desk of his brooding editor, L. Rand Bonarias, who plunges into the unfinished manuscript and discovers that while Otto’s love story may be a literary gimmick, his unbelievable account of the story of Creation and Niva Miramontes is more than artful prose. A gospel of fantastic spirituality and abiding love, The Spectacle of Let – the Oliet and Obit, reimagines the marvel of Creation and the unbound possibilities of a single word.
BIO:
Samuel Zamarripa published his first book of a duology, The Spectacle of Let–the Oliet and Obit, with Floricanto Press in 2017. The companion book in the series, The Spectacle of Let–the Soul of a Miracle, also published by Floricanto Press in 2018. He is currently at work on his third novel, a story about the incarceration of immigrants in the American South and the rise of a transformative and enchanting drone from the quagmire of a foreboding swamp.
He holds a B.A. from New College of Sarasota, Florida, and Masters of Public Policy from the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife, Robin D. Zamarripa.
