This one might be familiar to lots of you (and will almost certainly have appeared on other people’s lists!). Carmen Maria Machado’s stories felt revelatory when I first read her collection Her Body and Other Parties. I love how it starts with directly addressing the reader, like she’s directing the staging of a play, giving you instructions on what to see in your mind’s eye and hear in your head that you can choose to obey or ignore. Her work has so much confidence and swagger, it’s very charismatic!
It’s this mesmerising quality of showmanship, I think, which is so appealing about her work, and which makes even the retelling of a familiar fairytale feel so startling and fresh. She even tells you, right near the start: “This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them.”
First published online in Granta in 2014 and available to read here. Collected in Her Body And Other Parties, Graywolf/Serpent’s Tail, 2019
A Personal Anthology 