Tales We Read was kicked off on September 23, 2020 with a sprint and flash!
In the first session we are reading and discussing a short story entitled Eight bites by Carmen Maria Machado. In “Eight Bites,” Carmen Maria Machado goes inside the mind of a woman who undergoes bariatric weight loss surgery. It’s often said that food is family, and the relationship of Machado’s narrator to food and her own body is refracted through her relationships with the women of her family: an iron-willed mother, gossipy sisters, and a concerned daughter. Weaving realistic storytelling with a surrealist twist, Machado explores the complicated feelings around a simple clinical procedure: desire, shame, love, envy, and a sense of having “lost” something more than merely weight.
- Read the story online.
Carmen Maria Machado (born 1986) is an American short story author, essayist, and critic frequently published in The New Yorker, Granta, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award[2]and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Her stories have been reprinted in Year’s Best Weird Fiction[3], Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best Horror of the Year, The New Voices of Fantasy, and Best Women’s Erotica. Her story collection Her Body and Other Parties was published in 2017. Her memoir In the Dream House was published in 2019. Machado lives in Philadelphia with her wife. More … (Wikipedia)
- Carmen Maria Machado’s author page: Includes biography, writings, interviews, events, media, and more.
- Carmen Maria Machado’s homepage at the Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
The Tales We Read Book Club provides an opportunity to explore virtual communities with a fun program delivered online in the fall of 2020, sponsored by New Brunswick Libraries and the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University.
All students are welcome to join any of the available discussion to take short mental breaks from their online courses by the fool-proof method of distraction: reading short stories and discussing related issues with fellow students.