Nikki Barnhart

She had only applied to work in the Halloween store because she thought it would be temporary. But this store was open year-round—the building owned, not leased, by a man named Ed, who was thin and wiry, nostalgic and ambiguous as a figure in a Grant Wood painting. The devotion he extended to the rows of ludicrous masks and cackling witch animatronics seemed more suited to the motions of a farmer, tending to something whose harvest would keep people alive, rather than fleetingly amused.

Amy Poeppel brings her signature “big-hearted, charming” (The Washington Post) style to this wise and joyful novel that celebrates love, hate, and all of the glorious absurdity in between. In the heart of Greenwich Village, three women form an accidental sorority when a baby—belonging to exactly none of them—lands on their collective doorstep. Lauren and her family—lucky bastards—have been granted the use of a spectacular brownstone, teeming with history and dizzyingly unattractive 70s wallpaper.

For varying degrees of better or worse, 2020 never let us forget the urgency, the limitations, and the possibilities of our humanity – it made us more aware of what it means to occupy the bodies we inhabit, and what we do within them. In case it wasn’t already front of mind, this year made us reconsider what a strange thing it is to be alive. Morgan Christie’s incandescent These Bodies captures all of these elements in a debut story collection that resonates deeply in 2020, and far beyond.