Garden Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics)

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.

"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)

Table of Contents:
Avid Gardeners
Jamaica Kincaid, "The Garden I Have in Mind"
Elizabeth von Arnim, from Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Doris Lessing, "Flavours of Exile"
Henry David Thoreau, from Walden
L. P. Hartley, "Up the Garden Path"
William Maxwell, "The French Scarecrow"

Garden Pleasures and Sorrows
Colette, "Bygone Spring"
Virginia Woolf, "Kew Gardens"
Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden-Party"
D. H. Lawrence, "The Shadow in the Rose Garden"
Willa Cather, from My Antonia
Jane Gardam, "Blue Poppies"

Wild Gardens
Frances Hodgson Burnett, from The Secret Garden
Sandra Cisneros, "The Monkey Garden"
Daphne du Maurier, from Rebecca
Jean Stafford, "The Lippia Lawn"
Meir Shalev, "A Night in the Garden"

Humor in the Garden
Saki, "The Occasional Garden"
W. W. Jacobs, "A Garden Plot"
O. Henry, "Roses, Ruses and Romance"
Joan Aiken, "The Serial Garden"
John Collier, "Green Thoughts"

Gardens of the Imagination
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter"
Italo Calvino, "The Enchanted Garden"
J. G. Ballard, "The Garden of Time"
Matsuda Aoko, "Planting"

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.

Everyman's Library

Pub Date: May 24, 2022

1.1" H x 7.3" L x 4.7" W

400 pages

hardcover