Garden of Reading: Contemporary Short Fiction about Gardeners and Gardening

By Michele Slung

Book Overview

Eudora Welty, James Thurber, Doris Lessing, Lisa St. Aubin, Saki, V.S. Prichett, Colette, and Robert Graves are included, along with unexpected finds from Stephen King, J.G. Ballard, Sandra Cisneros,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590207270
• ISBN13: 9781590207277
• Release Date: January 2012
• Publisher: Overlook Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

a garden of delightful stories

If you love gardens and gardening as I do, you know you are thinking about gardens all the time, even in, or especially during, the winter months. That's one of the reasons that I so much enjoyed a book I read recently entitled Garden of Reading, edited by Michele Slung. With a selection of outstanding writers that includes such notables as Eudora Welty, Robert Graves, Doris Lessing, Colette, Barbara Pym, and Edna O'Brien you know the quality of the writing will stand the test of time like a fine heirloom rose. The stories are not merely paeans to the glories of gardening, however. More often the gardens serve as the backdrop or setting of stories that are quite compelling and sometimes disconcerting examinations of the minutia of human emotions and interactions. In Eudora Welty's story, "A Curtain of Green", an eccentric Southern widow finds reality and memory meshing in a kind of vegetative haze. In Stephen King's slightly mad story "Lawnmower Man" an unlucky everyman finds his worse gardening phobia realized. James Thurber enjoys his usual comic romp in the delicious "See No Weevil"; while V. S. Prichard's sly take on adultery gives new meaning to the symbolism of a fig tree. Gardens as symbols of greed and power are evoked in Rose Tremain's story "The Garden of Villa Mollini". In "The Secret Garden" by Victoria Rothchild, a young woman's naive belief in organic gardening is lost; while in "Blue Poppies" by Jane Gardam, a middle- aged woman struggles to keep her patience while her senile, garden-savvy mother rambles over the grounds of a crumbling but still beautiful estate. In each story no matter what its theme or intent, the world of plants and people come together, sometimes colliding, sometimes colluding, always aware on some level of their importance to each other. As winter days shorten and our gardens temporarily disappear, it's a treat to pick up a book in which flowers, trees, shrubs, and grass are forever blooming, growing, and waving in the warm, scented air.