Garden Stories - (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics) by Diana Secker Tesdell (Hardcover)

About the Book

"An anthology of classic short fiction about or set in gardens"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"An extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of the garden--be it through vision, touch, or scent--lends unity to Garden Stories. This little hardback will suit anybody who likes to get their hands dirty, as well as those who prefer to admire the blooms from a distance." --TImes Literary Supplement (London)

About the Author

DIANA SECKER TESDELL is the editor of fifteen Everyman's Pocket Classics anthologies, including New York Stories, Christmas Stories, Love Stories, Stories of Art and Artists, Dog Stories, Cat Stories, Stories of the Sea, Horse Stories, Bedtime Stories, Stories of Fatherhood, Stories of Motherhood, Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories, Wedding Stories, and Stories from the Kitchen, as well as the Pocket Poets anthology Lullabies and Poems for Children.