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PowellsBooks.Blog
Authors, readers, critics, media − and booksellers.

Original Essays

Hispanic Heritage Month Spotlight: Carmen Maria Machado

by Powell's Books, September 19, 2019 9:57 AM
Hispanic Heritage Month Author Spotlight: Carmen Maria Machado

Thirty-three-year-old Carmen Maria Machado is a bit of a wunderkind, prestigious enough to warrant a Wikipedia page, but too young for it to be much more than a list of her accomplishments. Shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for her debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, Machado has also received a National Book Critics Circle Award and Lambda Literary Award, and been a finalist for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize, Nebula Award, and Shirley Jackson Award, among others.

Though race rarely figures directly into Machado’s work — in a 2018 interview with The Rumpus, she noted, “I am Latina, more or less white-presenting, and writing about race is a thing that I have not done a ton of, because I feel like I exist in a liminal space where I don’t want to take space away from women who are experiencing racism in a more intense, visual way than I am.” — her short stories and forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House, are intensely concerned with otherness, queerness, and the ways cultural biases and proscriptions imprint themselves on the female psyche.

Drawing on the lexicons of folklore, the 19th-century Gothic, horror, popular culture, and American society’s evolving ideas about female corporeality, Machado excels at telling stories about women on the edge. One of the delights of reading her work is the way Machado manipulates popular — but not traditionally “literary” — forms like urban legend, screenwriting, and books constructed for children (for example, the Choose Your Own Adventure series) to hold a funhouse mirror up to society; though the embarrassments and violence her characters suffer will resonate with most readers, finding them embedded in ghost stories and episodes of Law & Order: SVU demonstrates just how saturated with brutality and otherness popular American ideas of femaleness really are.

Powell’s bookseller Cosima C. writes, “[Her Body and Other Parties is] a book that brings striking form to female pain and queer desire, and each story is a feast woven together with sentences that are good enough to eat,” a sentiment shared by many on the Powell’s staff. We love Machado for her candor and stylistic innovation; for the way both horror and the erotic thread through her work; and for her youth; reading Machado’s fiction, it feels possible to rescript centuries of female subjugation into a present and future narrative of autonomy, celebration, and triumph.

More favorite books by Latinx and Hispanic women authors:

Painting Their Portraits in Winter by Myriam Gurba
The First Rule of Punk by Celia C. Pérez and Kat Fajardo
A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernández
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)e by Jasminne Mendez
Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera



Books mentioned in this post

Painting Their Portraits in Winter: Stories

Myriam Gurba

A Cup of Water Under My Bed: A Memoir

Daisy Hernandez

Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

Carmen Maria Machado

The First Rule of Punk

Celia C. Pérez

The Poet X

Elizabeth Acevedo

Night-Blooming Jasmin(n)E: Personal Essays and Poetry

Jasminne

Juliet Takes a Breath

Gabby Rivera
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