A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties. Her work has appeared in Granta, the New Yorker, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. She has received the Bard Fiction Prize, and been a finalist for the National Book Award. the Kirkus Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and Nebula Award. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
For all the horror, In the Dream House is a ravishingly beautiful
book, a tender, incandescent memoir like no other. There's no doubt
that Machado is one of the brightest literary talents around.
*Observer*
This is challenging and thrilling. There is never one reading.
Memoir here is resurrection, rebirth and archive. In the Dream
House is a dark jewel reflecting something startling - familiar and
strange.
*Guardian*
Untamed, original and brilliantly unclassifiable ... brave,
experimentally wrought
*New Statesman*
Absolutely remarkable ... What makes this book truly exceptional is
how Machado creates an archive where, shamefully, there is none
*Roxane Gay*
This book is devastating. Machado is a sublime, phenomenal,
breathtakingly good writer and a new work by her is a momentous
occasion.
*Daisy Johnson*
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.
*The New York Times*
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*
Innovative and haunting, compelling and jarring, Machado has
created what is essentially a new form of memoir ... excruciatingly
honest and yet vibrantly creative
*Irish Times*
Provocative and rich ... the cycle of abuse is a kind of poisonous
enchantment in which victims can be enthralled. Ms Machado's memoir
casts a powerful counter-spell
*Economist*
'Astonishing ... Machado writes with such precision and poetry it's
hard not to be utterly blown away as she pinpoints those moments
that can cause the destruction of all relationships. An absolute
must-read for 2020.'
*Stylist*
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."
*New Yorker*
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*
The way [In the Dream House] seamlessly weaves the facts of
[Machado's] life with fictions-the ghosts that still haunt her, the
fact that even time travel could not undo what's been done-is a
masterstroke. Machado's that writer who can convincingly
code-switch between sci-fi nerdery and lyrical realism. She's
equally at home in both worlds.
*Wired*
Piercing. . . . In the Dream House makes for uneasy but powerful
reading.
*USA Today*
A raw, innovative memoir.
*BBC Culture*
Realistic, poetic, and sometimes grimly funny ... A hard-hitting
and layered book that reminds us we need to continue addressing
abuse with queer women's communities
*Diva*
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*
An unflinching, engrossing memoir.
*POPSUGAR*
A stunning book, both deeply felt and elegantly written.
*Boston Globe*
Forget everything you think you know about memoir when reading
Carmen Maria Machado's brilliant, twisting, provocative entry in
the genre
*NYLON*
Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you've ever read, In the
Dream House is a singular accomplishment.
*Esquire*
A masterpiece of horror memoir ... a new frame of understanding
from one of our most thrilling and daring contemporary writers
*the i Paper*
Machado uses slippery changes in point of view and a knack for
translating emotion into concrete sensation to slide readers into
her space, where they experience the fear and confusion of abuse
from the inside. She applies the astonishing force of her
imagination and narrative skill to her own life, framing chapters
with storytelling motifs (unreliable narrator, star-crossed lovers,
choose-your-own-adventure) and playful footnotes. . . A fiercely
honest, imaginatively written, and necessary memoir.
*Kirkus Reviews, starred review*
In the Dream House is an impressive, finely calibrated work of
literature, one that throws open the door to a subject that's still
rarely broached, and makes the reader's stay equally illuminating
and unsettling. . . . In assuming the role of architect and
archivist, Machado makes In the Dream House as much a memoir as a
monument.
*The A. V. Club*
What might feel gimmicky in another writer's hands is revelatory in
Machado's: In the Dream House becomes a complexly layered
exploration of the personal and the political, and the literary,
both a brave baring of a painful experience and a reckoning with
our collective failure to truly deal with queer intimate partner
abuse.
*Lambda Literary*
[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*
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*
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 has pulled off an amazing feat: a book that comments on its
own existence and the silences it endeavors to fill; a work deeply
informed by a sense of identity and community; and page after page
of flawless, flaying, addictive prose.
*BookPage, starred review*
In the Dream House is a brilliant successor to her acclaimed short
story collection.
*Star Tribune*
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 Machado's memoir about being trapped in a love relationship
that turns nasty and shameful is unflinchingly honest. It's also
brilliant in the originality of its story-telling, its prose which
is often sheer poetry, and its persuasive insights into why the
sufferer keeps coming back for more. In the Dream House affirms
that Machado is one of the most talented young writers of our
day.
*Lillian Faderman*
Machado's writing is full of repressed physical energy and the raw
juice of annihilating female fury
*The Millions*
In this open examination of abuse-how it starts, how it hides, how
it tears at the victim's sense of self-Machado reimagines and plays
with the memoir form, bridging the gap between reader and author in
a way that is original and haunting.
*Library Journal*
Machado's use of a vivid experimental lens to show women struggling
for agency is startling
*New Yorker*
With Machado, everything feels razed and built anew
*Star Tribune*
Machado's dazzling addition to the memoir genre is spine-tinglingly
monstrous
*Daily Telegraph*
One of the best LGBTQ+ books of 2020
*Independent*
There is never one reading and the book shapeshifts under you,
unsettling, wrongfooting, ensnaring you. It recreates the past and
resuscitates the dead, and in the end it offers a rebirth for its
author.
*Dazed*
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