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parsed(2019-11-05) - pubdate: 11/19
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pub date: 1572933600
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In the Dream House

A Memoir

November 5, 2019 | Trade paperback
ISBN: 9780771094507
$24.95
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Description

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties.

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. 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.

And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--haunted houses, erotica, bildungsroman--in which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations about the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships.

Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, Star Trek and Disney villains, fairy tales, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

About this Author

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.

ISBN: 9780771094507
Format: Trade paperback
Pages: 264
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2019-11-05

Reviews

"Merge the house and the woman-watch the woman experience her own body as a haunted house, a place of sudden, inexplicable terrors-and you are reading the blazingly talented Carmen Maria Machado."-Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

"Breathtakingly inventive. . . . Machado's writing, with its heat and precise command of tone, has always had a sentient quality. But what makes In the Dream House a particularly self-aware structure-which is to say, a true haunted house-is the intimation that it is critiquing itself in real time. . . . Here and in her short stories, Machado subjects the contemporary world to the logic of dreaming."-Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

"If there are no new stories, only new ways to tell them, Carmen Maria Machado has found a way to do exactly that, ingeniously, in Dream House - a book that manages to break open nearly everything we think we know about abuse memoirs. . . . The result is a gorgeously kaleidoscopic feat - not just of literature but of pure, uncut humanity."-Entertainment Weekly

"Machado rejects standard memoir conventions in favor of short discursive chapters. . . . The result is a thoroughly engrossing, sometimes enraging must-read."-BuzzFeed 

"Daringly structured and ruthlessly inquisitive. . . . The heart of this history is clear, deeply felt, and powerful. A fiercely honest, imaginatively written, and necessary memoir from one our great young writers."-Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Machado is able to captivate the reader while telling a brutally honest narrative of abuse."-Marie Claire

"Forget everything you think you know about memoir when reading Carmen Maria Machado's brilliant, twisting, provocative entry in the genre."-NYLON

"In the Dream House is proof, a nod towards justice, however nebulous or impossible that idea might be, as it sounds out against gatekeepers, archival erasures, and silence, articulating the possibility of queerness against the grain of singularity."-Frieze

"A groundbreaking memoir in terms of both form and content. . . . Get ready for Machado to take you on several breakneck cross-country trips of the soul."-The Observer

"Machado has written an affecting, chilling memoir about domestic abuse."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[Machado's] writing exhibits all of the formal precision of her fiction, and the book draws the reader deep into the varied rooms of the haunted house of the past. Highly recommended."-Booklist, starred review

"Absolutely remarkable. . . . What makes this book truly exceptional is how Machado creates an archive where, shamefully, there is none."-Roxane Gay

"Wrought with alarming premonition, propulsive rhythm, and a trove of folkloric archetypes, Machado's genre-crushing memoir is a meditation on the eclipse of knowledge and intuition by the narcotic light of a destructive bond that feels like love."-Melissa Broder

"It's a testament to Carmen Maria Machado's abilities that a memoir as harrowing as In the Dream House can also be so energizing to read, so propulsive."-Kevin Brockmeier

"Carmen Maria Machado's memoir about being trapped in a love relationship that turns nasty and shameful is unflinchingly honest. . . . In the Dream House affirms that Machado is one of the most talented young writers of our day."-Lillian Faderman

"Carmen Maria Machado has re-imagined the memoir genre, creating a work of art both breathtakingly inventive and urgently true. In the Dream House is crucial queer testimony. I've never read a book like it."-Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

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