At a time when women are still expected to disassociate from their bodies and defer to straight  male desire  as if it were the only natural impulse, Carmen Maria Machado’s prose moves directly inside the female body with an entirely different drive.

Aimee Parkison’s new collection of stories, for which Parkison was awarded the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize, outshines many contemporary literary conversations on misogyny, the “female body,” and women’s rights.

At a time when evangelical values have, by Bush or by crook, descended upon the United States like the aftermath of a Hiroshima mushroom cloud, we might as well remember a controversial Victorian, Sigmund Freud.