The Body Farm Stories

The long-awaited new book from the critically acclaimed author of The Lightkeepers and The Wildlands: an intense and insightful collection that celebrates the horrors and joys of inhabiting our bodies

The body cannot tell any lies. From birth to death, and through all the transitions in between, the body stores our knowledge and history, our feelings and experiences. Our betrayals. These insightful and empathetic stories, from the critically acclaimed author of The Last Animal, shine new light on our physical vessels set against our physical world, two landscapes irretrievably connected and altered over time.

An entomologist solves cold cases and upholds a sense of justice by studying the decay of corpses in a field and the insect life they develop. A caregiver obsesses over a stained-glass lampshade to deal with the elegiac losses of Alzheimer’s. A sister with webbed fingers highlights the often-universal belief that our siblings just might be creatures brought forth from the deep. The memory of a scent evokes the haunting legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.

These eleven stories display Abby Geni’s great capacity to take us into the lives and experiences of others to scrutinize the physical self: birth, childhood, transition, mental health, trauma, aging, illness, love, sex, and death.

ABBY GENI is the author of The Lightkeepers, winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award for Fiction and the inaugural Chicago Review of Books Award for Best Fiction; The Wildlands, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Last Animal, an Indies Introduce Debut Authors selection and a finalist for the Orion Book Award. Geni is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the Iowa Fellowship.