So What?Įven the most artful memoir lays claim to a certain artlessness. The Extremely Nerdy Love Stories That Are Burning Up the Bestseller List The Grim Lesson of the Week’s Weirdest Literary Controversy She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife ( Columbia).What I Found When I Went Through Cormac McCarthy’s Trash She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. 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, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, VQR, Conjunctions, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be ( Bookshop).Ĭarmen Maria Machado's debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize.

She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.Īnd it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope-the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman-through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.

In the dream house author