A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of short stories from around
the world that celebrate gardens and gardeners
Gardens have been fruitful settings for stories ever since Adam and Eve
were ejected from Paradise. This delightfully wide-ranging collection
brings together all sorts of tales of the tilled earth, featuring secret
gardens, enchanted gardens, gardens public and private, grand and
humble.
Spectacular gardens are viewed from the perspective of a snail in
Virginia Woolf's "Kew Gardens" and from that of a sheltered teenage girl
in Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden-Party." The family in Doris
Lessing's "Flavours of Exile" hauls succulent vegetables and fruits from
the rich African soil, and Colette in "Bygone Spring" luxuriates in
extravagantly blooming flowers. Children discover their own peculiar
paradises in Sandra Cisneros's "The Monkey Garden" and Italo Calvino's
"The Enchanted Garden," while adult gardeners find things that move and
haunt them in William Maxwell's "The French Scarecrow" and Jamaica
Kincaid's "The Garden I Have in Mind."
Gardens of the imagination round out the anthology: the beautiful but
fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter," the
crystal buds of J. G. Ballard's "The Garden of Time," ravenous orchids
in John Collier's "Green Thoughts," and Matsudo Aoko's "Planting," in
which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given--roses
and violets, buttons and broken cups, love and fear and sorrow. Garden
Stories is an abundant crop of entrancing stories and the perfect gift
for gardeners of all kinds.
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on
acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil
stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style
half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
