The Body Farm
Stories
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- $229.00
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- $229.00
Descripción editorial
Finalist for the CHIRBy Awards
Longlisted for The Story Prize
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Geni's mixed-bag second collection (after The Last Animal) drapes offbeat details over well-worn narrative threads. In "The Rapture of the Deep," the volume's uneventful opener, Geni gussies up a chronicle of an estranged brother and sister with lush depictions of the sister's marine biology work as a shark tagger. Better is "Across, Beyond, Through," in which a divorced father drives his 14-year-old trans child, Eden, across the country after Eden is beaten by his religious mother for binding his chest. After the father tries to ask informed questions about his identity and transition, Eden reddens and responds cuttingly, "I get it. You did some googling," before he opens up. For "Petrichor," the most frightening entry, Geni shrewdly uses the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic as a backdrop for the tale of a woman losing her five senses. In the title story, an entomologist at an anthropological research center—where corpse decomposition is studied—contemplates murdering her wife's stalker ex-boyfriend. Unfortunately, the narratives of fractured families, late-night escapes, and physical abuse tend to feel a bit heavy-handed and obvious, despite Geni's welcome efforts to bring their settings to life with distinctive details. Readers will hope Genie's fine level of craft pays better dividends next time out.
